Guest Post - From Open Access to Preprints: Are We Repeating the Same Mistakes in Scholarly Publishing? - The Scholarly Kitchen

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Jonny Coates. Jonny, originally an immunologist, is a leading expert in preprints and metascience, focusing on science communication, trust, and research culture reform.

For more than two decades, the open access (OA) movement has been one of the most influential reform efforts in scholarly communication. It reshaped policies, business models, and expectations around the dissemination of research. Yet the movement has also faced persistent criticism, including from longtime observer and journalist Richard Poynder, who in 2023 announced that he would no longer cover open access after concluding that the movement had failed to achieve its original goals. 

In an ebook outlining his reasoning, Poynder argued that open access not only fell short of its ambitions, but in some cases produced unintended consequences, including the rise of predatory publishing, the normalization of pay-to-publish models, growing inequities, and new opportunities for publishers to extract revenue through “double dipping”.

Whether one agrees with Poynder’s conclusion, his critique raises an uncomfortable but important question for other reform efforts in scholarly publishing. In particular, the preprint movement, once seen as a pragmatic, low-cost, researcher-driven route to openness, now faces its own moment of uncertainty.

In 2023, bioRxiv marked a decade of rapid growth in life-science preprints. Yet only two years later, the landscape looks less secure. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), long the most significant funder of preprint infrastructure, has largely withdrawn from the space. Advocacy organizations have shifted their priorities and lost their expertise, and adoption rates in several fields appear to be plateauing. At the same time, new initiatives such as Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) are emerging, potentially fragmenting effort and authority within the ecosystem. Questions have already been raised about the current trajectory of the preprint movement.