A different kind of openness: global approaches to open publishing without author fees

Researchers are increasingly recognizing three major issues affecting the current state of scholarly communication.

First, the author-pays model for open publishing – dominant in discussions across Western Europe and North America for over a decade and widely accepted through APCs, BPCs, and so-called transformative agreements – serves only a subset of the global academic community. It entrenches systemic inequities in scholarly publishing and introduces new ones, by effectively excluding authors from underfunded fields and those in developing countries (Asare-Nuamah 2023; Druelinger & Ma 2023; Ayeni & Larivière 2025; Ma & Davin 2025). Some even describe it as “the great betrayal of the openness movement” (Raju & Claassen 2022).

Second, the prevalence of the author-pays model is often overstated, particularly when scholarly communication is considered globally. Numerous approaches to open publishing without author fees are successfully implemented worldwide. Latin America offers a notable example, with initiatives such as the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) sustaining a long and successful history. More recently, Africa has introduced the Diamond Open Access African Platform for Open Scholarship (APOS), launched in 2021, alongside a major investment announced in December 2025 to strengthen over one hundred no-fee open access journals and platforms across nine countries.

Third, these alternative pathways to open access remain insufficiently represented and valued in commercial tools used for tracking research outputs and informing research(er) assessment (Kulczycki et al. 2025; Van Bellen et al. 2025).

This poster highlights a range of open publishing solutions that do not rely on author-facing charges and examines similarities and differences across regions. It also interrogates variations in the implementation of the Diamond Open Access model and the underexplored distinction between non-profit and non-commercial approaches to scholarly publishing (Raju & Nkrumah Kuagbedzi 2025). Finally, it raises the question of whether efforts in the Global South to move away from “Western” models of publication and assessment by “providing customized resources and support designed to meet the specific needs of individuals and communities” in the pursuit of genuine equity (Mfengu 2025) are and should be mirrored in the Global North, particularly in disciplines facing similar challenges.