Twenty years of growth in open science show that the destination is agreed on by all. Open science is cost-effective at scale, drives innovation, fosters public trust and saves lives. The question is, why aren’t we there yet?

A recent ����Vlog article captures the mood: funders are withdrawing support for Article Processing Charges (APCs) or capping what they will pay, citing profit margins approaching 40 per cent among major publishers and the familiar complaint that institutions are being charged twice for the same content.

We should be clear about what is actually happening. Funders remain strongly committed to the open access transition – but in their frustration with the hybrid publishing model, they risk conflating two very different things: hybrid APCs and gold APCs. Confusing these channels, and the different role each plays in a genuine transition, risks prolonging the subscription status quo indefinitely.

A gold APC to a full open-access journal is a complete, single payment: it covers peer review management, editorial infrastructure, long-term archiving and discoverability: the full cost of publishing that article, in perpetuity, with nothing else owed. By contrast, a hybrid APC (which can range in price dramatically) is effectively a top-up: it makes an individual article open within a subscription journal that continues to draw income from subscriptions.

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“Transformative agreements”, which have replaced some “big deal” subscription deals, fold subscription and APCs into one payment. But the transformation isn’t happening – and without clarity on costs, funders and institutions can end up overpaying for the same service. 

Funders’ frustration is entirely rational; they see the global shift toward open access proceeding very slowly despite their mandates, while still seemingly costing them more. They are caught in a system in which open access does not replace closed subscription but functions as an expensive addition to it.

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This outcome was foreseen. In 2018, cOAlition S launched Plan S, mandating immediate open access for publicly funded research in Europe and beyond by 2020. Recognising that an overnight transition was unrealistic, it authorised transformative agreements and hybrid publishing as a bridge, explicitly time-limited, to full open access. But by January 2023, . It confirmed it would end financial support for transformative arrangements after 2024, having concluded that the transition was not completing itself.

There is also growing interest in open alternatives to gold open access. This is understandable but the evidence is sobering. Diamond journals – free to both authors and readers but not free to produce – are finding their niche, but this model cannot provide a sustainable solution for publishing the millions of scientific articles produced each year. As history consistently shows, these projects stop when institutional or state funding ends.

Meanwhile, green open access, or repository-based self-archiving, is at best an uneven compromise. It does not eliminate costs; It relies on the subscription model as its foundation, and it requires sustained funding to maintain institutional, national or subject-based archives.

As well as managing peer review at scale, publishing platforms must ensure long-term discoverability in , AI-ready formats. They must also deploy increasingly sophisticated safeguards against fraud, including AI-driven screening, expert integrity checks and continuous system upgrades. These are not optional extras. They are the foundation for trustworthy science and they are non-negotiable.

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Most would agree. The problem is that when these publishing essentials are funded through overlapping charges, costs become compounded and confused. Indeed, stakeholders frequently disagree on what “publishing costs” actually include, how they vary by discipline and publishing model and, specifically, how open models compare with subscription approaches.

The transparency of APC pricing has made it an easy target, prompting calls to “cap” APCs without examining what those prices actually sustain, risking a reversion to the subscription status quo. We need clarity. A working group – involving funders, institutions, researchers, learned societies and publishers – is the logical next step. If we are aligned on what responsible open-access publishing requires, we also need to align on what each scenario for delivering it actually costs.

Funders, institutions and researchers have the collective power to insist on cost-effective, transparent channels for open science. In doing so, they would not be punishing publishers: they would be helping the industry by providing an objective consensus that can be used to accelerate the transition to open science and restore public trust in the entire system, including trust in publishers.

The promise of transformative agreements was that transformation would actually occur. It is time to hold everyone – publishers and policymakers alike – to that promise. We must set another deadline. And this time we must mean it.

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Fred Fenter is chief executive editor at Frontiers.