Why publish open access? Because immediate, paywall-free publication increases a paper’s readership and citation potential, satisfies funder mandates from cOAlition S, UKRI and Wellcome, keeps outputs REF-eligible, and extends publicly funded research to readers who cannot access subscription journals — benefits that typically outweigh the cost of article processing charges.
Open access is a publishing model in which the final, peer-reviewed version of a research output is made freely available online at the point of publication, without a subscription or paywall, under a licence that permits reuse. That single design choice — removing the paywall — is what drives every benefit and every trade-off discussed below.
- Why does open access matter for visibility and citation?
- Why do funders require open access?
- Why is open access so expensive?
- Is open access REF-ready — and who else benefits?
- Common questions about publishing open access
- What this means for authors going forward
Why does open access matter for visibility and citation?
Removing a paywall expands a paper’s potential readership beyond subscribing institutions to independent scholars, clinicians, policymakers and researchers in lower-income countries. Publisher-commissioned meta-analyses report open-access citation advantages in the region of 18–40%, a range corroborated by Taylor & Francis and Springer Nature author-services data. Independent bibliometricians caution that part of this gap reflects self-selection — authors tend to pay for open access on papers they already judge to be their strongest — so the advantage should be read as a correlation, not a guaranteed multiplier.
Visibility gains are strongest for interdisciplinary and applied fields, where readers outside a paper’s home discipline or sector are less likely to hold a subscription. For research administrators tracking impact, unrestricted access also improves the reliability of usage metrics reported to funders and REF impact case studies, since download and view counts are not artificially depressed by paywall friction.
Why do funders require open access?
A growing share of research funding now carries a binding open-access condition, not a recommendation. Non-compliance can mean ineligible outputs, clawed-back grant funds, or exclusion from future funding rounds — which is why open access has shifted from an ethical preference to a compliance requirement for most UK and European researchers.
- cOAlition S / Plan S — launched in 2018, this consortium of research funders requires immediate open access with no embargo, typically under a CC BY licence, for all funded research articles.
- UKRI — UKRI’s open access policy has applied to journal articles and conference proceedings from grants awarded since 1 April 2022, and extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024.
- Wellcome — Wellcome’s open access policy requires immediate open access under a CC BY licence for all research articles arising from Wellcome funding, with no embargo permitted.
| Funder | Embargo permitted | Preferred licence | Route accepted |
|---|---|---|---|
| cOAlition S (Plan S) | No | CC BY | Gold or green with no embargo |
| UKRI | No (journal articles) | CC BY | Gold or green via repository deposit |
| Wellcome | No | CC BY | Gold, with preprint posting expected |
These mandates are the practical reason many researchers no longer treat open access as optional: the funding itself is now conditioned on it.
Why is open access so expensive?
The commonest objection to open access is cost. Gold open access is usually funded through an article processing charge (APC) paid by the author, institution or funder rather than by the reader, and APCs at established hybrid and fully open-access journals frequently run into several thousand pounds per article. That cost has not disappeared — it has moved from the reader’s library subscription to the author’s grant budget, which is precisely why the objection persists even as access improves.
Three developments are making that cost more visible and, in places, avoidable:
- Price transparency requirements — cOAlition S’s Price and Service Transparency Framework requires participating publishers to disclose a cost breakdown behind their APCs, rather than setting a single opaque list price.
- Transformative and Read-and-Publish agreements — many UK institutions now hold deals with major publishers that bundle subscription and publishing costs, so individual authors at those institutions pay no APC directly.
- No-fee routes exist — green open access (self-archiving the accepted manuscript in a repository) and diamond open access (journals that charge neither reader nor author) both avoid APCs entirely; a substantial share of journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals charge no APC at all.
The honest answer to “why is open access so expensive” is that the cost of publishing has not fallen — it has been reallocated and, under frameworks such as Plan S’s transparency requirement, made auditable in a way subscription pricing never was.
Is open access REF-ready — and who else benefits?
For UK institutions, open access is also an assessment-eligibility issue. REF’s open-access policy, first applied in REF 2021 and carried forward into REF 2029 preparations, requires eligible journal articles and conference proceedings to be deposited in an institutional or subject repository within three months of acceptance to count towards the exercise. An output published open access but deposited late, or not deposited at all, can be ruled ineligible regardless of its quality — making the deposit step, not just the publishing decision, the compliance-critical action.
Beyond assessment mechanics, open access serves the public-benefit case that funders increasingly require research to articulate: publicly funded findings reaching the clinicians, teachers, small businesses, patient groups and policymakers who funded them through taxation but who never held a university library card. This is the same accountability logic behind open metadata and contributor-transparency standards more broadly. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014 as one such standard; it is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and, like open access itself, exists to make the research record more usable to people beyond the original authorship team.
Common questions about publishing open access
Should you publish open access?
In most cases, yes — and increasingly it is not discretionary. If your funder is part of cOAlition S, or is UKRI or Wellcome, open access is a condition of the grant. Even without a mandate, the visibility, compliance and public-benefit case generally outweighs the APC cost, particularly where a transformative agreement or green route removes that cost entirely.
What are the benefits of open access publishing?
The core benefits are wider readership, a documented (if contested) citation advantage, compliance with funder mandates, REF eligibility when deposited correctly, and public access for readers outside subscribing institutions. Authors publishing gold open access also typically retain copyright under a CC BY licence rather than assigning it to the publisher.
Do authors pay for open access?
Often, but not always. Gold open access is usually funded via an APC paid by the author’s institution or funder. Green open access (repository self-archiving) and diamond open access (no-fee journals) both let authors publish openly without paying an APC at all.
What are the disadvantages of open access publishing?
The main drawbacks are APC cost where no waiver or agreement applies, uneven journal-quality perceptions in some fields, and the administrative burden of tracking funder-specific licensing and deposit requirements. Predatory journals exploiting the APC model are a further, separate risk that authors should screen for via journal vetting tools.
What this means for authors going forward
The direction of travel is unambiguous: funder mandates are expanding, not retreating, and REF-style assessment exercises are tightening deposit compliance rather than relaxing it. Researchers, institutions and publishers who treat open access as a compliance and visibility strategy — choosing the route (gold, green or diamond) that matches their funder’s requirement and their budget — are better positioned than those who treat each publication decision in isolation. The cost objection remains real, but transparency frameworks and no-fee routes mean it is no longer the unanswerable objection it once was.
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