Why funders shouldn’t withdraw money from open access publishing | Samuel Moore

Cancer Research UK’s decision to stop funding article processing charges marks a significant shift in how they approach open access. In its April 1st announcement (not an April Fool), the organisation argues that, despite years of investment, the current APC-driven model of open access publishing “hasn’t worked” in delivering a system that is genuinely accessible or fair. Instead of reducing barriers, they claim, the model has simply propped up the businesses of for-profit publishers, especially through hybrid journals of subscription and open access content.

A central concern is the inefficient use of charitable funds. Cancer Research UK estimates that ending APC funding will save around £5.2 million over three years, money it argues can be better spent directly on research. The organisation highlights the contradiction of using donated funds to cover publishing fees while the same research community continues to pay subscription costs to access journals. In this sense, APCs are framed not as a sustainable solution to access, but as part of a system that duplicates costs without resolving underlying inequities.

More broadly, the decision reflects a critique of the scholarly publishing ecosystem itself. Cancer Research UK maintains its commitment to open access in principle, but argues that the current system is failing to deliver “an efficient and fair” model of communication. While it is not clear whether other funders will follow suit, the mood in the UK does seem to have markedly shifted against open access and whether it is worth the costs. The UK has spent a great deal on OA and many are feeling that the investment has simply lined the pockets of the commercial publishing industry.

Yet missing from the announcement is what CRUK’s commitment to open access looks like in the absence of money supporting the same. The charity has reintroduced an embargo period to its OA policy, allowing researchers 6 months before their articles have to be openly available, and so their commitment to OA is already diluted through the announcement. The charity hopes that withdrawing funding will ultimately “drive publishers to look for a more sustainable arrangement between themselves, universities and academic institutions.”

It is reasonable to want to reassess APC-driven approaches to open access publishing. As funders made money available for OA, publishers have oriented their business models around article volume in order to receive as many APCs as possible and to convince institutions that transformative agreements are worthwhile. The result is a situation in which more and more articles are published, as quickly as possible, with recourse to as little paid labour as possible. Publishers prioritise scale, automation and homogeneity to cope with this volume, leading to problems of fraud, oversupply and peer review fatigue.

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