1. Introduction

In this paper, we examine feedback we collected on Towards Responsible Publishing, a proposal for reform in scholarly communication published by the consortium of research funders cOAlition S in October 2023. Five years earlier, cOAlition S had introduced Plan S, an influential yet controversial initiative designed to ensure that research outputs produced by grant recipients were “published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo” (cOAlition S, 2018; see also Šimukovič, 2023). The new proposal outlined a more radical vision for scholarly publishing that places an emphasis on removing barriers to the publication and dissemination of scholarly knowledge, in particular through use of preprints combined with open, post-publication peer review. It promoted the development of “a community-based scholarly communication system (…) that empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs” (cOAlition S, 2023). The vision is compatible with the so-called “publish, review, curate” (PRC) model (Corker et al., 2024), which encourages sharing research through preprints, followed by open peer review and various possible forms of editorial curation.

As part of the consultation process, we were commissioned to collect feedback from a broad range of stakeholders including researchers, publishers, research membership bodies, infrastructure organisations, and academic libraries. In the remainder of the paper, we will analyse how respondents framed their perceptions of the challenges implied by the transition proposed by cOAlition S. For this, we draw on materials collected through a number of focus groups as well as free text responses to a stakeholder survey.

In principle, many of the respondents welcomed the prospect of transitioning to a financially more sustainable publishing system with fewer barriers for participation. At the same time, the systemic change envisioned in the cOAlition S proposal would demand a broad and coordinated effort across all stakeholder groups in scholarly communication. This goal is complicated by the many overlapping investments actors have in the existing system – such as in entrenched academic reward structures and established commercial revenue models (Johnson, 2019; Neylon et al., 2019). In this paper, we will treat the accounts of the resulting conflicts as actors’ articulations of collective action problems involved in reforming the scholarly communication system (Ostrom, 1990; Hess & Ostrom, 2007; Neylon et al., 2019). Doing so can help us, firstly, to determine the extent to which there is agreement amongst stakeholders, or at least the extent to which their views are compatible with each other. Secondly, stakeholder conversations about collective action problems in the context of scholarly communication are important objects of study in their own right, because they have a particular performative aspect. By discussing collective action problems, stakeholders construct their own role in the scholarly communication system and their opportunities for shaping it. This can help generate capacity for collective agency, but it can potentially also feed into various forms of cynicism about the (im)possibility of systemic change (cf. Davidson, 2024).

The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we set the scene by briefly recapitulating a variety of changes and innovations in the scholarly communication system in recent decades. We then introduce the conceptual framework for our analysis by outlining theoretical literature on collective action problems and how we propose to apply it to our material. After describing our methods of data collection and analysis, we discuss how participants in our data collection conceptualise four main types of collective action problems. We then conclude by considering the implications of our findings for debates on the future of scholarly communication.

2. Thinking about change in scholarly communication

Scholarly communication is characterised by an important tension: while often seen as resistant to change, it is currently experiencing notable experimentation and innovation across multiple dimensions.

The push for Open Access (OA) has been a primary driver of change (Pinfield, 2025; Šimukovič, 2023). What began as a simple distinction between Green and Gold OA has evolved into a more complex ecosystem. cOAlition S itself is often argued to have played an ambivalent role in this history (Šimukovič, 2023; Moore, 2025). In an effort to mandate that publicly funded research be made immediately open access, its earlier policy known as Plan S is seen to have created new incentives for publishers and institutions to move toward business models built around article processing charges (APCs) that are paid upfront by individual authors, rather than subscriptions paid by institutions. Although the stated aim was to promote openness and equity, the policy reinforced the dominance of hybrid OA models that combine APCs and subscription fees, effectively broadening the income sources of commercial actors and reinforcing their position. Other notable recent developments in this domain include a renewed focus on Diamond OA, a model that sustains journals and publishing platforms through sponsorship, for example, by academic institutions, public funds, or third parties such as philanthropies (Pinfield, 2025).

Aside from publishing business models, there is significant innovation in technologies and social practices, for example, in peer review processes. Recent experiments range from portable reviews to patient involvement in the review process (Kaltenbrunner et al., 2022a). New platforms operating on a PRC model are challenging conventional publication approaches (Corker et al., 2024), and systems for recognising peer review contributions are also being developed (Okereafor, 2022).

Some disciplines have embraced these changes more readily than others. High-energy physics, for instance, has made significant strides in adopting open science practices, particularly around preprinting, demonstrating how field-specific characteristics can accelerate transformation (Delfanti, 2016). However, this remains an exception rather than the norm in academic publishing overall (Neylon et al., 2019).

Aside from targeted interventions, scholarly communication is also changing due to sheer growth in the volume of contributions. A recent study of the “strain on scientific publishing” reported that in 2022, the total number of articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus was 42% higher than in 2016 (Hanson et al., 2024). This puts strain on the system that may in turn fuel innovations attempting to streamline what is seen as an overburdened system (Waltman et al., 2023).

While scholarly publishing is thus evidently evolving all the time, many attempts to innovate in scholarly publishing end up having merely a local or disciplinary impact, and only few reach large-scale and widespread implementation (Neylon et al., 2019).

3. Analysing actors’ accounts of barriers to change

Arguably the most important reason why scholarly communication is not more often subject to international large-scale  collective consultation practices like the one organised by cOAlition S is the fact that it is a complex multi-layered international system involving a diversity of actor groups, including many heterogeneous research communities, and also publishers, funders, universities, and academic libraries. A number of previous studies have suggested that reforming such a complex system creates collective action problems arising from an entrenched economic and institutional configuration that has developed over a long period of time (Johnson, 2019; Neylon et al., 2019; see also Rushforth, 2025). That is, change is difficult because it would require concerted effort by stakeholders groups who have distinct motivations that often contradict each other, for example, the desire to remove barriers to access to scientific literature vs. the commercial imperative to maintain or expand revenues sources; or interest in experimenting with novel publishing formats vs. investment of many researchers in career progression systems based on prestigious journal publications.

An important source of theoretical thinking about collective action problems is the work of political scientist and economist Elinor Ostrom (1990). Ostrom offers a detailed analysis of collective action problems around the use of common pool resources and the factors that facilitate and hamper the ability of users to find solutions for them. Ostrom argues that common pool resources differ from public and private goods in that they are non-excludable but rivalrous, meaning that it is hard to prevent individuals from accessing them while use of the resource by one person diminishes its availability for others. Examples include limited water supply for irrigating farmland, forests, and fishing grounds. Common pool resources always face the risk of congestion or depletion through overuse by individuals. For common pool resources, both governance by the state and privatisation tend to deliver suboptimal results. The state is typically too far removed from the resource to provide effective governance; and privatisation is often inefficient, inter alia because it is hard to monitor and enforce property rights in what is usually considered a community resource – especially when the resource is spread across a large area.

Ostrom’s research focuses on analysing examples where groups of users have found collective ways of successfully managing common pool resources without degrading them. Concrete factors influencing the chance of success include the possibility to control membership in a common pool resource; the cost of inaction and availability of information for decision-making; congruence between rules and local conditions, ensuring alignment between benefits and responsibilities; and the possibility for those affected to establish new routines that facilitate collective administration and conflict resolution. Broader social factors such as trust, reciprocity, shared norms, and opportunities for learning and experimentation also enhance the likelihood of successful collective action. Ostrom’s framework lends itself to intervention. Her work details strategies for parsing and articulating collective action problems, which – if mobilised in concrete settings – tend to render them more amenable to a solution. This in turn allows her to criticise a priori ideological statements that posit the impossibility of solving collective action problems (e.g. “people are just too selfish to find solutions and thus need external steering by governments”, or, the inverse, “public solutions do not sufficiently accommodate individual selfishness and therefore privatisation is required”).

What exactly does it mean to think of scholarly communication in terms of a good subject to collective action problems? Hess and Ostrom (2007) refer to the “knowledge commons” in relation to research, where knowledge is used in broad terms to mean intangible ideas. Such knowledge is characterised by low excludability – “it is difficult to exclude people from knowledge once someone has made a discovery” (Hess & Ostrom, 2007, p. 9) – and can therefore be seen as fitting into the category of public goods or common-pool resources. Knowledge is also characterised by low rivalrousness – one person’s use of it does not diminish its value to others. Digital information and data, which contribute to knowledge, are generally distinguished from analogue publications by low rivalrousness. However, carriers of information and data, even in digital form,  can be set up in a way that is exclusionary – where access to them is limited through mechanisms like subscription paywalls for journals. However, despite such practices around scholarly information and data objects, knowledge production in the research system retains crucial analytical similarities with other commons environments. Most importantly, much like the cases studied by Ostrom, scholarly communication heavily relies on communal self-organisation of participants in social and intellectual terms. Previous literature has suggested that journals and other forms of infrastructure related to scholarly communication can best be theorised as so-called club goods, which exclude access to at least some users but where rivalrousness is low (Neylon et al., 2019; Potts et al., 2017). However, it is important to note that the key resource in the scholarly environment is not merely knowledge itself but also the community that generates, tests, filters and engages with the knowledge. This also means that scholarly communication is always at risk of buckling under the strain of congestion, careless use, and overuse (Moore, 2025).

One important function of scholarly communication infrastructures is that they catalogue the shared knowledge base of a community that researchers draw on and contribute to, and simultaneously structure access to this literature (Roosendaal & Geurts, 1997). For example, the perceived centrality of particular publication channels in research communities draws attention to the research published in them. This applies not only to reputed journals but also to preprint servers, at least in some areas of study such as physics (Chtena et al., 2025; Delfanti, 2016). Conversely, well designed and maintained institutional repositories can play an important role in ensuring accessibility of research that would otherwise be difficult to track down for readers or locked behind paywalls (Harnard et al., 2008). Scholarly communication infrastructures also play a role in regulating membership in a community. They rely on various types of quality control and monitoring of the behaviour of authors, which can result in sanctions for the violation of common rules, for example in the case of plagiarism or otherwise manipulated submissions (Bornmann, 2011). Another key function is coordinating the work community members are required to invest to maintain the resource, for example, through peer review and various forms of editorial work or quality control of submissions. The very act of participating in such forms of publishing-related community service play an important role in creating and reproducing community structures (Hess & Ostrom, 2007; Kaltenbrunner et al., 2022b). Other types of actors, too, play important roles in enabling the work of community actors. Publishers, for example, often provide infrastructural services that can facilitate the handling of manuscripts as well as the distribution of literature (Inger & Gardner, 2013). University libraries provide local support and advice for digital preservation, archiving, and the use of an increasingly broad range infrastructural tools (Babeu et al., 2009).

On the flipside, the proper functioning of journals and infrastructures of scholarly communication is always threatened by congestion and overuse, for example, when submission volumes exceed the editorial and review capacity of journals (Hanson et al., 2024), or through careless or wilfully misleading behaviour of submitting authors which can put strain on the willingness of reviewers to donate their time (Kaltenbrunner et al., 2022b). Another constant threat for the sustainability of the scholarly communication system at large is moreover commercial business models that strain the budgets of academic institutions and funders, as exemplified by the so-called serials crisis in the 1990s that in turn provided important impetus for the emergence of OA models (Fitzpatrick, 2011; Johnson, Watkinson, & Mabe, 2018).

The proposal of cOAlition S presents a special type of collective action problem due to the significant systemic change it implies for the organisation of scholarly communication. Core features of the envisioned system include pervasive transition to preprints as the main publication medium, adoption of an open, post-publication model of peer review, and transforming business models to do away with APCs and limit the role of commercial actors to providers of infrastructural services. The prospect of such ambitious changes also requires stakeholders to renegotiate longstanding mechanisms for structuring community interactions around publishing as discussed above, for example, in regard to organising community labour, monitoring membership, curating literature, and ensuring infrastructural support and sustainability.

Our main analytical interest in this paper lies in studying exactly how actors themselves conceptualise collective action problems that arise in such a renegotiation. Ostrom’s analysis highlights how collective action problems can be usefully parsed and framed in ways that render them more easily amenable to a solution, for example, by articulating responsibilities, developing mechanisms to ensure accountability, or development of new structures for administrative self-organisation. Stakeholders in scholarly communication, too, engage in problem-framing practices when they make sense of their daily routines and the challenges they encounter.This is visible, for example, in critical discussions of questionable publishing and business models (Horbach, 2022), perceived or or objective publication pressure (Jin, 2024), or delayed or unconstructive peer review reports (Ruben, 2020). By articulating everyday challenges and the barriers to more desirable alternatives, participants construct, reproduce or challenge understandings of their own role in scholarly communication and their opportunities to shape it. Depending on the framing of the problems, this can make them appear more tractable and thus actively create capacity for collective agency, but it can also make the possibility of meaningful change appear unrealistic and thus undermine this capacity.

Discussions about collective action problems in scholarly communication do not occur in a vacuum. They are shaped by established discursive tropes and assumptions, as well as by the concrete settings in which such conversations take place. As noted earlier, scholarly communication is a highly distributed system with complex interdependencies (Johnson, Watkinson, & Mabe, 2018; Neylon et al., 2019). Faith in the feasibility of change is therefore often tempered by past experience and by assumptions about other actors’ motivations (Šimukovič, 2023). Its long history also encourages viewing scholarly communication as a settled technology rather than one still open to collective shaping, despite ongoing experimentation and innovation. Established conventions often function as socio-technical black boxes: research and publishing practices are tightly entangled with infrastructures, workflows, and conceptual constructs –such as the peer-reviewed journal article as the default medium –making alternatives difficult to imagine (Bazerman, 1988; Csiszar, 2018; Biagioli & Galison, 2003). Coordinated agency is further limited by the lack of formal collective spaces in which scholarly communication can be discussed as a shared project. Among researchers, assumptions about publishing are often reproduced in informal interactions, for example when senior scholars advise PhD students or postdocs on navigating intertwined career and publishing demands (Nästesjö, 2021; see also Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2008). Such settings encourage researchers to frame scholarly communication primarily as an individualised career problem rather than as a collective choice.

Yet while established forms of organising scholarly communication are easier to defend and fall back on, alternatives remain possible. We therefore focus on how actors imagine solutions to collective action problems and the discursive strategies they use to rearticulate issues otherwise presented as insurmountable. The PRC model endorsed by cOAlition S can itself be understood as an attempt to open conceptual black boxes in scholarly communication by disaggregating publishing workflows into discrete functions (Corker et al., 2024; see also Tennant, 2018). By analysing how actors propose to make collective action problems more tractable, we aim to amplify their voices and contribute to clearer problem articulations for future initiatives.

4. Data collection

The materials analysed in this paper were collected as part of a larger stakeholder consultation effort that we were commissioned to conduct by cOAlition S. This paper specifically relies on a subset of those materials, namely free text responses to an initial stakeholder survey circulated among stakeholders at the beginning of the project, as well as data collected in ten focus group meetings designed to elicit qualitative feedback by a variety of key stakeholders.

The stakeholder survey ran globally throughout November 2023 and was open to anyone who wished to contribute. While our analysis only draws on the optionally submitted free text responses, the survey required respondents to indicate their level of agreement with the vision laid out by cOAlition S. The survey summarised this vision in terms of five key principles:

• …stakeholders should commit to supporting the sustainability and diversity of the scholar-led publishing ecosystem
• …all scholarly outputs should be eligible for consideration in research assessment
• …quality control processes should be community-based and open, to ensure trustworthiness of research findings
• …all scholarly outputs should be shared immediately and openly
• …authors should be responsible for the dissemination of research findings

Respondents were additionally asked to share any further reflections in a free text format. In total, 440 complete responses were submitted. As part of the survey, participants were also given the option to express interest in joining focus groups. This step was purely voluntary and did not ensure a place in the focus groups. A breakdown of participants suggests that the survey attracted responses predominantly from researchers across various career stages (285 in total), followed by librarians (35), editors (30), publishers (18), and academic administrators (15). A small number of responses were received from publishing service providers (4), infrastructure providers (3), policy makers (2) and funders (1). Survey respondents were predominantly based in Europe and North America, with approximately 260 responses from Europe (including Western, Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe), 50 from North America, and a smaller number of responses from other regions, including around 30 from Asia, 15 from Australia and New Zealand, 10 from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 10 from Africa, with 20 from other regions.

The subsequent focus groups, organised between December 2023 and February 2024 in a fully online format, brought together representatives of academic publishers (e.g., PLOS, Taylor & Francis), libraries (e.g., Max Planck Digital Library), learned societies (e.g., Royal Society of Chemistry, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies), membership bodies (e.g., European University Association, West and Central African Research and Education Network), research funders (e.g., German Research Council), scholar-led service providers (e.g., SciELO, Review Commons), scholarly infrastructures (e.g., Crossref, African Open Science Platform), and researchers from different disciplinary communities. Halfway through the process of convening focus groups, we realised that actors in Eastern Asia and Oceania were underrepresented due to the time zones chosen, leading us to convening dedicated focus groups. In total, 72 participants from 24 countries participated in the focus groups.

Each session started with a short presentation of the proposal by a representative of cOAlition S, who left immediately after to avoid influencing the discussion. Some of us (Chiarelli, Reyes Elizondo and Kaltenbrunner) organised and led structured discussions around the main elements of the proposal. Focus groups participants were asked to respond to key snippets from the proposal text as projected on a PowerPoint slide, such as the following:

“Our vision is a community-based scholarly communication system fit for open science in the 21st century. This system empowers scholars to share the full range of their research outputs and to participate in new quality control mechanisms and evaluation standards for these outputs.”

Participants were then asked to comment on the outcomes of the initial stakeholder survey (visualised through graphs), as well as to comment on more specific statements referring to the current publishing system, for example, “The full potential of peer review [in the current publishing system] is not realized” or “The sharing of research outputs [in the current publishing system] is needlessly delayed”. Lasting 90 minutes, all focus groups were recorded and transcribed using Otter.ai.

The transcripts were iteratively coded in Atlas.ti, using an inductively developed codebook that has been published separately (Cox et al., 2025). A comprehensive descriptive analysis of the empirical findings is available in the appendix of the project’s concluding report (Chiarelli et al., 2024a). Ethical approval for the study was granted by the Ethics Review Committee Social Sciences at Leiden University.

The data analysed in this paper are subject to several limitations. Participation in both the survey and the focus groups was based on self-selection, resulting in a convenience sample that likely overrepresents stakeholders with a prior interest in scholarly communication reform; the findings should therefore not be interpreted as representative of the broader academic population. While participants were drawn from 24 countries, geographical representation was uneven, with some regions underrepresented despite targeted efforts to address time-zone constraints.

In the following section, we present an initial overview of our findings, subdivided into four recurrent themes in the way stakeholders conceptualise barriers to reform. The sections include illustrative quotes from the focus groups as well as from the free text responses to the survey.

5. Findings

5.1. Resource conflicts as a barrier to reform

Actor framings of the barriers to collective action implied by the proposed shift toward a preprint-centric scholarly communication system commonly focused on conflicts around two types of resources, human labour and funding. Regarding labour, stakeholder survey responses and focus group discussions highlighted concerns about cOAlition S’ proposal that all research outputs –papers, data, and other raw materials –be shared immediately. Combined with a move from pre- to post-publication peer review, this would substantially increase the volume of publicly available contributions. Making these materials available and providing at least some level of screening or review could create significant additional work (Hostler, 2023), and some respondents feared that the expanded review and curation responsibilities would make researchers’ workloads unmanageable.

I do worry about that workload for evaluation by experts, what it actually means for our experts to spend so much time evaluating, I spend personally larger and larger fraction of my time evaluating other people’s research. And this is only going to increase it (FG Scholarly Infrastructure)

One focus group participant went a step further and claimed that it is not the lack of publishing models and infrastructures that posits a barrier for reform, but rather researchers’ “laziness” – a reluctance to invest any more time in making materials more openly available. The argumentation recalls a priori expressions of skepticism toward the principal solvability of collective action problems, as criticised by Ostrom.

But the thing is, nothing stops me from putting all my details in order the moment I want to. Nearly every chemistry journal has reached the stage where I can do preprint updates until accepted manuscript and stuff. So the weakness of this question is that if it’s needlessly delayed, it’s because researchers are lazy not because there’s some sorts of like mechanistic publishing sites, I think preventing research outputs from being delayed. (FG Scholarly Infrastructure)

Yet, we also did come across statements that articulated the problem quite differently and with implications that seemed to actively encourage collective agency. Focus group participants raised a variety of scenarios in which the adoption of a publishing format as proposed by cOAlition S would not result in an unacceptable increase of workload for a particular actor group, but in more efficient use and workable redistribution of labour among different groups.

A common theme was for example the call for a change in academic reward systems that would rebalance incentives in favour of community labour needed for publishing, in particular peer review. By improving this congruence between benefits and responsibilities, the system would more effectively support and sustain community labour. This would mean that institutions with the power to shape career progression criteria would have to figure much more prominently in a reform, in particular universities and learned societies. One survey respondent proposed that instead of a community-led system, “we should talk about institution-led systems” (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher). Participants also named as a concrete starting point the need to create new infrastructural support functions that would relieve the burden on researchers.

Even though I think it is important that authors themselves disseminate their work, it should be noted that this is not their main responsibility in my opinion. Doing research is their main responsibility. A good solution might be a “dissemination officer” in a faculty. (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher)

Centralised databases are essential, whether national/international or institutional. Open Research Europe is an example. It is critical that any such database feeds into search engines such as Pubmed or Google Scholar, and generates a DOI. Quality control would be easier with centralised databases, but it could also be decentralised. (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher)

Some respondents moreover raised the potential for a preprint-based system combined with open peer review to redistribute, rather than increase, the amount of work that is expended on peer review. The model proposed by cOAlition S specifically aims to reduce the significant amount of work that comes with serial resubmissions to journals, i.e. the currently dominant practice where authors immediately resubmit a rejected manuscript to a new journal until it is accepted for publication. Since each journal operates with its own siloed review processes, this entails that manuscripts are often reviewed by many different researchers before they appear in the public domain. Not only can this be considered a waste of effort on the part of reviewers, but it also delays the publication of findings that could prevent further duplication of research with a similar design. This argument highlights the cost of inaction and implies as a concrete objective the establishment of new routines for collective self-administration around peer review.

Because the prestige factor of journals is often linked to career progression, researchers are pressured to keep submitting and resubmitting the same article to a series of journals of decreasing impact factor in their field. This takes a lot of time, and delays publications of the data. (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher)

As for the problem of added financial responsibility, respondents highlighted a number of ways in which the transition to a preprint-centric system would require investments that could potentially create barriers for particular institutions and countries. In the focus group for scholarly infrastructures, several speakers mentioned the need for putting in place new infrastructure, services, and tools, which in turn would require longer-term funding strategies to ensure sustainability. Minting persistent identifiers (PID) for publications in open infrastructure is one example. Assuming the cost of a PID at $1, one participant suggested that expenses become significant especially in low and middle income countries, thus creating a significant barrier to reform.

I think that PIDs are vote enablers, and barriers to success. Let me explain PIDs are really important, they also they are currently allowing us to create these open databases that can eventually be used to do more inclusive research, assessment and more inclusive research, data metrics research and psychometrics research. But also, there’s potential unintended consequences in a sense that, to have DOIs, you actually have to pay $1, which does not seem like much for Western countries. But it can make a big, big, big difference for a country in the developing world, which ultimately will lead to them, their research output not being available in the tools that we use for research assessment. (FG Funders)

But focus group participants and survey respondents did also imagine the possibility of working out a more concrete division of support and financial responsibilities. Generally, this includes a call to stop supporting any kind of model that continues to create revenue for large commercial actors and instead redirect such expenses to supporting open infrastructure. Such statements often included concrete suggestions aimed at particular actor groups, as in the following quote, in which the speaker problematises continued investment in so-called read and publish (R&P) deals, sometimes also referred to as transformative agreements.

In the proposal, there is a lack of clarity about who the stakeholders are and the level of commitment required – very generic statement which I think most stakeholders would agree with but would require more details. That said, libraries & HEIs as key stakeholders need to commit more ardently. We should be supporting open infrastructure as opposed to R&P agreements/ Gold OA etc, and supporting alternative routes to achieve OA/ Open publication. Again, we need to break habits and look to challenge dominant models! (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Librarian)

Some also highlighted the progress that has already been made, while pointing out the need for trust-building on the part of cOAlition S, especially in light of its previous role in establishing the current APC system:

Many stakeholders have already committed. The biggest challenge is that on the one hand we have the vast sums paid to the commercial publishers and on the other, no agreement on where we should re-invest – should we choose to redirect our funds, and no guarantee that the new initiative won’t simply be acquired by one of the commercial operators. (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher)

5.2. Prestige and selectivity as necessary functional elements of the publishing system

A second theme in actor framings of the collective action problem pertains to the thematic complex of prestige and selectivity of publishing outlets. Both play a specific role in structuring academic careers and the intellectual production of communities, providing information that can be used to resolve conflicts around the allocation of resources such as peer attention, funding, and employment. A commonly voiced concern was that a publishing system that removes pre-publication peer review also removes an important tool that helps structure the information space for researchers (and the wider public) and so keeps the number of publications manageable for readers – a traditional approach to curation. Related to this is also the notion that the function of journals in filtering information by means of selective publication has a democratising function in allocating attention by academic peers. In a publishing system entirely based on preprints, some focus group participants worried that already reputed researchers will find it even easier to attract attention for their work, while the output of less visible researchers will largely disappear from view, since there is no journal brand name that helps draw attention.

“So one of the things with preprint servers is (…) you’re creating a situation where the people who already have the glam reputation, etc., they get their voices amplified (…) if you compare this to the influencer on Twitter with a million followers, basically other people kind of fall by the wayside. And comparing this to like arXiv, for example, (…) people game the arXiv like crazy. So I mean, what time of day are you supposed to submit [to increase your] average chance of being read and so on. So it sounds beautiful. But there is huge scope for creating an even more inequitable and more dystopian landscape (…)” (FG Researchers)

A related conflict has to do with the investment of academic communities in existing conventions of publishing. Focus group participants felt that many colleagues, especially the more senior ones, do not see a problem with the current system, in large part because their current status is based on existing criteria of achievement. A common theme was to describe the status quo as a chicken-and-egg problem, a metaphor that frames constraints as circular and interlocking, making it difficult to imagine where collective agency might begin.

So for me, it’s really a chicken and egg problem (…) So you know, these days, you have people publishing in certain journals, because they are incentivised to do that. So what do you change first, the journal or the incentive, which changes both at the same time, it’s useful, but you might get quite a lot of resistance from established researchers all over the place, if you suddenly tell them that, indeed, what made their career is now not highly regarded anymore. (FG Researchers)

In a variation on the same theme, some respondents worried that early adopters of the vision outlined by the proposal would run particular career risks, which can be seen as an irresponsible burden to place on them. This is an argument that has often been applied to OA in general.

Yeah, I just want to say that (…) it depends on which stage of your career you are in, like, you know, for, for an established professors, you know, they may think, in one way, but then for early career researchers, they may think, in a very different way, not because they do not support open scholarship, but because, say, in the US, there is a tenure and promotion system. And some institutions have very strict requirements, like, you know, you have to publish in certain journals, you have to publish X number of monographs before you can get tenure. So [there are] restrictions from the institution that early career researchers have to take into account. So I think, you know, to some extent, depending on which stage… of the career [of] a person (…) the perception of these questions will, you know, vary a lot. (FG Libraries)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the voices quoted in this section are mainly those of researchers, and they are evidently grounded in personal experience. Yet a number of similar arguments were also made in the focus groups for library professionals. This perhaps reflects a concern of libraries with serving the needs of academic communities, rather than exposing them to the uncertainties entailed by experimentation with new publishing models.

However, other respondents rearticulated the collective action problem around prestige of existing outlets and the investment of researchers in it by proposing that the notion of editorial gatekeeping and academic incentives need to be disentangled. This highlights the possibility that publishing systems can change without necessarily changing the rationales for publishing. One survey respondent proposed that new curation mechanisms can gradually emerge as part of a collective experimentation process. Importantly, this framing leaves room of unplanned creativity and emergent solution, instead of emphasising interlocking constraints that make action in the present appear somewhat futile:

The real challenge therefore is to work out a better curation system, alternative to currently existing journals. Such a curation system cannot be imposed from above and will not emerge overnight, but it will also not appear by itself without a concerted effort of the community. Therefore, if cOAlition S is serious about its vision, solving the curation problem in the Open Science ecosystem should be one of its major focus areas. (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Researcher)

Others also discussed the possibility of alternative technical solutions for filtering information. One participant for example welcomed abandoning impact factors (associated with journals) and instead highlighted the need to come up with other citation-based indicators that could help structure access to literature in a system. This shifts the discussion from concerns about “giving up” on curating scholarly literature in a preprint-centric system to exploring alternative ways of doing so.

I do agree with the overall move away from impact factor, as we have seen that it is a tool of limited use when evaluating the strength of a journal, but I do think there is value in knowing which papers have been cited more than others. It can give an indication of what strengths are currently being exhibited in the scientific industry. If the paper is published widely, how can we ensure that the citation and other properties are properly maintained to maintain these citation numbers? (Initial Stakeholder Survey, Publisher)

5.3. Threats to research integrity/quality as a disincentive change

A third type of collective action problem focuses on perceived negative implications of cOAlition S’ proposal for preserving research integrity. The most common expression of this was concern about the notion that peer review “needlessly delays” (as worded in the original proposal) the communication of research results. The statement was perceived by some participants as vague and interpreted to mean that peer review is not important. Many participants worried that an emphasis on speed of dissemination could go at the expense of quality and would potentially incentivise certain actors to abuse the “new” system to inflate their publication numbers.

“I’m going to focus on the third [statement] (…), so “the sharing of research outputs is needlessly delayed”. (…) [R]esearchers (…) naturally want everything done quickly, close the folder, move on (…). But the key to me here is the integrity of what is published. And if you try and rush that, and you know, recklessly say speed over everything, you’re going to lose the integrity and the trust that comes with highly valued peer review (…).” (FG Learned Societies)

Some respondents also worried that a potential shift towards post-publication peer review could drastically increase the time demands placed on reviewers’ time and thus degrade the rigor of peer review.

And I think for a system to, to really work at the level of an entire community, it is very important to have such processes in not a wild west type of of system, or what I call the Twitter-isation of peer review, where anybody can just post things as fast as possible and reply as emotionally as possible. (FG Scholar-Led Service Providers)

A concern expressed in a number of different focus groups as well as the stakeholder survey was moreover the possibility that open peer review in a form that includes identification of the reviewer could be made mandatory. This, respondents stated, could discourage especially researchers in precarious positions (for example, due to their ethnicity or lack of seniority) to do peer review, since they might worry about retaliation in case they write negative reviews of the work of more senior colleagues (Bravo et al., 2019).

Yet again, some respondents rearticulated the problem in ways that made it less about an irreconcilable dichotomy, and more about finding an alternative solution for what is essentially a problem of controlling community membership and the behaviour of individual participants in scholarly communication. Some focus group participants began by problematising the dichotomy of the current system as being effective in discouraging and preventing misconduct and the vision of a system built around PRC as ineffective.

[T]o be very brutal, scholars and their institutions are notorious for being unwilling to confront when (…) there’s problems with content, institutions, authors can be very, very resistant. So we need to try and have systems by which malfeasance fraud, ethical issues in content that there’s some mechanism for dealing with them (…) And if anything, the flaw in the current system is that they’re not extensive enough, because as everybody knows, there’s tons of papers that should be retracted that aren’t. (FG Scholar-Led Service Providers)

Others discussed the possibility of adapting current mechanisms and institutions that combine faster dissemination with additional quality control, partly driven by technology.

I think that this is going to be a very sensitive topic in health related fields, where there’s the opportunity to cause public health mayhem by, you know, I, of course, like COVID was, I think, a really extreme example of this. But I think that there’s going to be, I imagine that, again, this is where the quality control mechanisms come in, or a way to provide context maybe as another way of phrasing this context for readers (…) a rapid system for providing peer feedback on something. (FG Scholarly Infrastructure)

5.4. Publishing as unruly diversity

A fourth type of collective action problem recurrently addressed by our respondents goes to the principal question of collective governability of the scholarly communication system as a shared good. More specifically, it portrays scholarly communication in terms of a diversity of local practices that makes collective governance on the scale proposed by cOAlition S hard or even impossible. Such diversity was most commonly seen as being of one of two kinds, epistemic and geographical.

In relation to the first, some focus group participants commonly pointed out that reform in scholarly communication is difficult because of the significant diversity in publishing practices across different fields. Yet the proposal suggests an implicit model of a process that is predicated on preprint publishing and post-publication open peer review, which participants associated mainly with the natural sciences (although monographs are mentioned in the proposal, but designated as out of scope). Participants worried that introducing such a model across fields would be incompatible with their respective publication cultures and thus could not be considered in its current form.

[W]hat kind of outputs are we talking about? (…) [F]or us from social science and humanities, books are part of our culture of dissemination, so that should be considered and rewarded. But also other documents that are vital for public policy design, and that are spread in different platforms, maybe should be considered and the last sentence, all scholarly output should be eligible for consideration and research assessment, according to the missions of the institutions they are assessing (…) is very vague and open. (FG Membership Bodies)

One participant specifically criticised the proposal of cOAlition S for the lack of humility in its scope. They emphasised the need to acknowledge that there

(…) is not going to be a one-solution-fits-all” and that “we are not going to know all of the solutions to ensure a rapid, transparent (…) dissemination of high quality scientific knowledge (FG Scholar-Led Service Providers).

Equally common was the perception that the proposal is too much based on a European perspective and fails to sufficiently account for regional differences in the challenges faced by scholarly communication systems globally. For example, focus group participants regularly pointed out that the notion of a scholar-led, non-commercial communication system is already a reality in Latin America (e.g., FG Libraries). This is principally acknowledged in the proposal. Yet respondents felt that it is problematic for cOAlition S to still frame its arguments in terms of a universal analysis of the shortcomings of scholarly communication.

Perceptions of a conflict between local and global contexts in publishing related also to questions of multilingualism. As one focus group participant put it, attempts to promote openness to multilingualism in publishing are often reduced to just including the most commonly spoken languages, such as Romance languages, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, and Indian (FG Scholar-Led Service Providers). Yet there are many small language communities that risk ending up even more excluded through reforms that equate multilingualism merely with including the aforementioned language communities.

Overall, the above types of feedback cannot be associated with any actor group in particular. Instead, they seem to reflect a widely shared feeling that proposals for reform on a large scale are extremely challenging because they require accommodating a vast range of differences in publishing practices across countries and research fields. The result is the impression that collective reform of publishing is better not attempted on the systemic level envisaged by cOAlition S and rather should be delegated to more localised efforts.

Yet participants in some focus groups also offered alternative articulations of the barriers to collective action that made the underlying problems appear more tractable. In these accounts, the diversity of practices and a large-scale collective approach to publishing are explicitly pictured as reconcilable. One participant noted that “there’s no reason why community-based needs to mean small scale”, suggesting that the publish-review-curate (PRC) model could be adopted on a broad scale without violating community norms (FG Publishers). A key move made in some of the feedback was also to problematise the notion that diversity as such is an unchangeable feature that any reform proposal has to accommodate. Instead, there could be a mutual shaping process in which practices change as communities adopt new approaches to publishing. One respondent to the initial stakeholder survey pointed out that the diversity of practices so far has actually prevented researchers from taking on more collective agency in shaping scholarly communication.

The fragmented nature of academic pursuit (i.e. discipline-based) means that strong leadership at a whole-system level has been lacking. While I don’t agree with absolutely everything that Coalition S has put out, the Coalition is (finally!) someone filling that leadership vacuum. We need to debate and discuss different ways of doing things. And most of all we need to take back ownership of what we create and bring publishers back to the role of facilitating the work of academic communities, not controlling or directing it. (Initial Stakeholder Survey)

Respondents also proposed ways in which reform can be planned on a collective level in broad strokes, to then be worked out on appropriate levels to ensure fit with local practices. A respondent to the initial stakeholder survey suggested a system of local pilot projects:

Your proposal has major positive (virtuous!) elements but is also very drastic. (…) I recommend experimentation with pilots, i.e., a learning-based approach, before deciding to upscale. And keep the need for diversity of models in mind. Scholars need to have possibilities for choice according to their situation and preferences. (Initial Stakeholder Survey)

A notable variation of this argument also assumes that it is, in principle, possible to develop a reasonably universal publishing model. However, it shifts the focus to the existing barriers that limit participation. How can we determine an appropriate publishing and review workflow across disciplines when many people are currently unable to participate equitably –and therefore remain invisible in the collective shaping of the system (FG Australia)? This perspective highlights the need for a concerted effort to expand global participation in scholarly communication, alongside the large-scale reforms envisioned by cOAlition S.

6. Conclusions

We propose that discourse about collective action problems is characterised by a particular form of performativity: It is here that actors reproduce or challenge an understanding of their own role in scholarly communication and their opportunities to shape it. Presenting problems in well-articulated form can mobilise actors to work on them, while other framings may convince actors that tackling them should not even be attempted. We discuss four main types of collective action problems that appeared in our empirical material: (1) concerns about resource conflicts and labour redistribution, (2) arguments about the functional necessity of prestige and selectivity hierarchies, (3) worries about threats to research integrity, and (4) diversity of scholarly communication practices as a challenge for concerted reform.

For each of these collective action problems, we first discuss recurrent framings that make them appear intractable. There are commonalities across these framings. First, they devote disproportionate analytical attention to the normative and material power of existing conventions in scholarly publishing, treating them as fixed constraints rather than as outcomes of prior coordination. For example, reforms in scholarly communication –such as those proposed by cOAlition S –are often framed as threats to established routines for filtering knowledge and organising hiring and promotion decisions. Such accounts emphasise the costs of disrupting entrenched arrangements while downplaying the possibility of collectively establishing alternative routines and procedures for communal organisation. As a result, large-scale reform appears futile from the outset. A related narrative expresses scepticism toward coordinated reform on the grounds that scholarly communication is too geographically and epistemically diverse to be governed collectively. This perspective depicts publishing systems as products of increasing complexity driven by disciplinary differentiation, obscuring the extent to which they rely on shared rules, learned practices, and institutionalised routines that have been actively constructed and could, in principle, be reconfigured.

Simultaneously, these accounts tend to downplay the cost of inaction, namely by glossing over the investment of resources and activities required to reproduce the status quo of scholarly communication and the forces that constantly threaten to destabilise it. For instance, many respondents worried that post-publication peer review might increase the incidence of research misconduct, even though the current system already fails in many ways to prevent misconduct and may even incentivise large-scale manipulation and other problematic practices (Hanson et al., 2024). The argument of publishing practices as an unruly diversity offers another example. By treating regional and disciplinary traditions as the sole legitimate determinants of publishing practices, it minimises the long-standing costs of fragmentation –such as the difficulty academic communities face in presenting a unified front when negotiating with commercial stakeholders in an oligopolistic market (Larivière et al., 2015).

To complicate matters further, accounts of the four types of collective action problems intersect, encouraging circular problem framings. Concerns about workload and funding are, for example, amplified by prestige-driven incentives that encourage repeated submissions to high-impact journals. Similarly, the emphasis on research integrity is intertwined with both workload distribution and existing prestige hierarchies, as maintaining quality depends on adequate reviewer effort and institutional incentives. Conversely, there is often an insistence that solutions to conflicts between the status quo and future visions need to be resolved before reform can even begin, an argumentative pattern that removes the possibility of changing existing conventions through collective experimentation. The status quo is thereby presented as a quasi-natural state, one that is best left to follow its own internal logic and that does not appear amenable to forms of collective governance (Ostrom, 1990; Hess & Ostrom, 2007).

We have already suggested above that the long history of scholarly communication itself arguably plays an important role in reinforcing a sense of inertia. Through routines that have emerged over a long period and have become second nature to members of academic communities, particular practices have become bound up with technological solutions and infrastructure in ways that make it hard to think of alternative ways of fulfilling particular functions. The effects can be understood as the inverse of the hype that often accompanies emerging technologies (Fenn & Raskino, 2008; Alvial-Palavicino, 2015): while hype relies on unrealistically optimistic representations of the future to mobilise actors in the present and so bring about a desired future, there can also be narratives about the future development of a technology (in this case, scholarly communication) that are overly despondent and therefore demobilise actors from trying to collectively shape it.

At the same time, our data also highlights how actor groups rearticulate collective action problems in such a way that they appear more tractable. A first key move here is to reimagine the status quo of scholarly communication as part of an ongoing process where publishing and research practices co-evolve with new technological means. Respondents, for instance, reconceptualised the diversity of publishing practices as part of an ongoing, mutual shaping process in which regional and disciplinary norms co-evolve with technological infrastructures to produce new conventions. Likewise, some respondents highlighted that new publishing workflows could redistribute effort within the publishing process (e.g., in peer review) rather than inevitably increasing the overall workload.

A second important intervention was to highlight the destabilising effects of dysfunctional elements of scholarly communication in the present and think of them as vectors that prompt the further evolution of the publishing system. Some focus group participants began by problematising the dichotomy of ‘current system=effective against misconduct’ and ‘PRC=ineffective against misconduct’. Instead of disproportionately emphasising reasons why researchers are unlikely to invest time in additional tasks required by digital publishing, this highlights incentives to experiment with alternatives to the status quo.

A third move consists in imagining new layers of support and governance that could facilitate the transition to a new publishing model. Illustrative of Ostrom’s analytical emphasis on the process of creating new institutions that facilitate the communal operation of common pool resources, some of our respondents envisioned change in institutional and community-level reward structures, as well as the creation of new functions for maintaining infrastructure and supporting researchers in a move to a PRC model.

What are the implications of this analysis for future reform initiatives? Our core argument has been that discourse about collective action problems can directly generate but also undermine the collective capacity required to address them. In our view, the most crucial precondition for systematically encouraging productive problem framings is to create more routine opportunities for explicit communal reflection on scholarly communication in the first place, since it is in such settings that the perception of compartmentalised agency and insurmountable constraints can be more easily replaced with a view of scholarly communication as a collective choice. This could take the form of structured forums or advisory mechanisms supported by institutions representing academic communities, such as learned societies and universities, as well as settings where different stakeholder groups can interact. There are also some lessons for how to set up and chair such collective deliberations. Most importantly, deliberation formats should make sure to treat scholarly communication as a continuously emerging technology, whose communal governance requires a form of institutionalised flexibility. For example, one could imagine routinised communal spaces for collective experimentation built around concrete infrastructure projects and publication platforms. In such settings, provisional arrangements could be tested, adjusted, and scaled, enabling reform to emerge through iterative development. Not least, while the intersection of collective action problems often gives rise to circular framings that discourage collective agency, it can also serve to highlight opportunities for coordinated interventions that could create synergistic effects. Notably, while intersecting collective action problems often produce circular framings that discourage coordinated effort, they can also reveal opportunities for synergistic interventions. Existing initiatives illustrate this potential: some funders now recognise preprints as valuable in evaluative decisions, potentially reshaping incentive structures (Avissar-Whiting et al., 2023); and national and international reform efforts are expanding research assessment criteria beyond narrow publication metrics, thereby acknowledging the communal labour necessary to sustain scholarly communication infrastructures (Huipen & Aspaas, 2021).

Competing interests

The material analysed in this paper was collected as part of a consulting project commissioned by cOAlition S and conducted by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University and Research Consulting Ltd. The analysis and arguments presented here were developed independently by the authors. Several of the authors are editors of MetaROR, a platform for open peer review in the field of metaresearch, based on a PRC model of scholarly publishing.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ellie Cox and Rob Johnson for their vital contributions to the collaborative work on which this paper is based. We also thank our partners at cOAlition S who worked with us on this project, in particular Robert Kiley and Bodo Stern, as well as all stakeholders who participated in the consultation process that enabled us to collect the data underpinning this study.

Funding information

The material analysed in this paper was collected as part of a consulting project funded by cOAlition S. Apart from this, no funding was received for the work reported in this paper.

Data availability

The codebook supporting the thematic analysis of the initial feedback survey and focus group transcripts is publicly available (Chiarelli et al., 2024b). Additionally, several other data sources collected as part of the Towards Responsible Publishing consulting project, though not used in the analysis presented here, are openly accessible. These include the full consultation report, featuring an interactive annex (Chiarelli et al., 2024a), the online researcher survey instrument and dataset (Waltman et al., 2024a; Waltman et al., 2024b), and the structured organisational feedback responses (Chiarelli et al., 2024c). All materials are distributed under a CC‑BY 4.0 license and can be accessed via Zenodo.

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