- The paradox of scientific knowledge
Science emerged to understand the world and serve society. Paradoxically, its results often remain inaccessible.
According to UNESCO (2021), science is humanity’s collective effort to comprehend the natural and social world through observation, experimentation, and validation of results. It organizes and connects different fields of knowledge, promoting a deeper understanding of nature and society – and offering tools for the collective good.
However, a substantial portion of this knowledge remains locked behind paywalls. The predominant academic journal model is still closed: access to articles depends on payment or subscription. A 2020 estimate shows that only 30% of scientific articles published in online journals are available via open access – meaning that the vast majority of global scientific output remains inaccessible to those who cannot pay.
In its Recommendation on Open Science (2021), UNESCO reiterates that free access to knowledge is essential to reduce inequalities and accelerate innovation. Even so, the current system continues to concentrate editorial and economic power, perpetuating exclusion and limiting the societal reach of science.
- The burden of paywalls and publishing costs
The closed model of scientific publishing creates a cycle of dependency. Scientists, often funded by public resources or philanthropic foundations, produce, review, and edit articles without charge – articles that are then sold back to the universities themselves. Deutsche Bank (2005) described this system as a “triple-payment” mechanism: the state funds the research, pays the reviewers, and ultimately buys the final product back from publishers.
These barriers have a direct impact on the dissemination of knowledge. Researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Arizona (2024) showed that every 1% increase in a journal’s subscription price reduces the number of citations of its articles by up to 1.46% – meaning that if texts are not read, they are not cited.
Furthermore, the “publish or perish” logic transforms high-impact journals into academic currency, dictating who advances in their careers. According to El País (2023), researchers paid over $1 billion to major publishers in four years just to secure open access for their work – a stark illustration of the economic pressure permeating the system.
- Pathways to the democratization of knowledge
Against this backdrop, movements and policies advocating for the democratization of science have emerged. They all stem from a shared principle: scientific knowledge is a public good and must be accessible to all.
A fundamental milestone was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), convened by the Open Society Institute. It championed the removal of financial, legal, and technical barriers hindering free access to scientific literature. The document defined open access as follows:
“By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
More recently, Plan S (2018), launched by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders including the European Commission, the World Health Organization, and the Gates Foundation, mandated that all research funded by these institutions must be published in immediate open access.
Despite the noticeable impact of Plan S in expanding the pool of scientific articles free to read, a significant portion of open access growth has occurred within hybrid journals. In this model, authors must pay extra fees to make their individual articles open access, while some articles remain locked behind subscriptions or fees. These publication fees, which can exceed $10,000 per article, create an unaffordable barrier for researchers in the Global South.
- Conclusion: open access as the core of science
The history of science is, to a large extent, the history of knowledge sharing. From empirical observation to peer review, what makes science a collective practice is precisely its openness to critique, verification, and reconstruction.
Clearly, someone has to foot the bill – compensating academic reviewers, maintaining journal portals, and disseminating research within the scientific community all cost money. However, open repositories such as arXIv, SSRN , and OLH, career evaluation reform initiatives in universities like More than Our Rank, and the open review system of the ARQUS alliance demonstrate sustainable pathways. They reinforce that open access is neither an afterthought nor a luxury, but a structural condition for the scientific system to function, ensuring that universality can once again become inseparable from the definition of science itself.
