While tech giants like Google rake in massive profits, a less visible industry operates in the background with a business model that raises ethical questions: academic publishing. Major publishers earn billions of euros by selling research back to universities — research those same institutions have already paid for, from scientists’ salaries down to pens and paper.
Many science enthusiasts are familiar with the scenario: a promising article title leads to a paywall demanding dozens of euros for access. Naturally, the question arises — why must we pay again for knowledge produced with public funding? According to the Estonian Research Council (ETAg), 68 percent of Estonia-affiliated scientific articles were open access in 2023. While that’s a significant increase from 47 percent in 2018, there’s still a long way to go before full transparency is achieved.
This is a global issue that, despite pressure from researchers and other stakeholders, has proven difficult and slow to resolve. At its core is a collision of research ethics, economic interests and deeply entrenched international practices.
The cost of knowledge
One of the biggest barriers to full open access is money. According to Marko Piirsoo, head of strategic analysis at the Estonian Research Council, publishing all Estonian researchers’ articles as open access would cost the country’s research system an estimated €6 million annually. “The research system simply doesn’t have that kind of money,” he said. For comparison, the total funding available in a single round of individual research grants is about €10 million.
Due to these financial and structural constraints, Estonia has not joined the international initiative Plan S, which aims to ensure that publicly funded research is immediately accessible to all. While Piirsoo supports the idea in principle, he emphasizes that implementing it would require a significant increase in funding.
The average article processing charge (APC) for open access publication is around €4,000, though in top-tier journals like Nature, it can exceed €10,000.
Even if the funding were secured, Estonia couldn’t solve the access problem on its own. Science is inherently international and a large portion of Estonian researchers’ work is conducted in collaboration with foreign partners. In 2023, for example, 2,329 out of 3,487 articles published in Estonia were co-authored with international researchers. “If Estonia were to impose this kind of requirement on its own researchers, it would put them at a disadvantage in global competition,” Piirsoo explained.
In his view, it’s nearly impossible to persuade, say, an American partner to publish open access if their funder doesn’t require it. In addition to national research agencies, key funders include organizations like the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “In short — I don’t know when we’ll get there. But I hope we will someday. It definitely won’t happen just in Estonia — it has to happen across the entire European Union at once,” Piirsoo concluded.
Libraries are the forefront
Although Estonia lacks a national policy document outlining a transition to open access, research institutions are not sitting idle. At the forefront are academic libraries, which continuously negotiate with publishers for better terms.
“Estonian research libraries don’t negotiate alone but act in coordination through the Estonian Library Network Consortium (ELNET) and international consortia,” said Elena Sipria-Mironov, project manager at the University of Tartu Library. This coordinated approach helps a small country like Estonia secure better publishing agreements and keep costs under control.
Currently, the University of Tartu does not have a central fund to cover article processing charges (APCs), and the library itself does not pay those fees. As a result, researchers must cover publishing costs primarily from their research project budgets. Still, the library and international networks offer some relief. For example, through Estonia’s participation in EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries), some publishers offer a 50 percent discount on APCs.
The most beneficial arrangements at present are so-called transformative agreements, which combine traditional subscription access with coverage of publishing fees. According to Marika Meltsas, a senior specialist in electronic databases at the University of Tartu Library, such agreements help researchers save money. However, the hope that APCs would simply match former subscription costs has not been realized.
For example, thanks to an agreement with the American Chemical Society, researchers saved over $100,000 in the past year. A similar deal with Cambridge University Press saved nearly £50,000. That said, these agreements have only been possible when the additional publishing-related costs were minimal.
Meanwhile, subscription packages from major publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley remain very expensive. In some cases, licenses have even been dropped. “The cost of Elsevier’s e-journal collection for the University of Tartu is nearly half a million euros per year,” Meltsas noted.
She added that APCs for open access articles have been increasing every year, especially in so-called hybrid journals that publish both paywalled and open access content.
As a possible future solution, the university is considering establishing a central fund modeled after the University of Helsinki, where such a mechanism is already in place. There, researchers can apply for cost coverage provided they prioritize fully open access journals or publishers with favorable agreements. According to Library Director Jaanika Anderson, the success of the Finnish model is due to a clear national policy and the fact that the fund is managed by the library, ensuring transparent cost tracking and researcher support.
Beyond negotiations and long-term planning, academic libraries also provide local infrastructure and assistance for researchers.
A researcher’s choices
Ultimately, the decision about where to publish lies with the researcher, who must weigh a journal’s reputation, readership and costs. Eva Piirimäe, professor of political theory at the University of Tartu, considers open access very important. At the same time, she noted that spending massive amounts of taxpayer money on it may not be worthwhile. Piirimäe herself prefers to make use of the university’s existing agreements that allow open-access publishing at no extra cost.
Access to research is also a priority for semiotics scholar Mari-Liis Madisson, particularly for researchers without access to university databases. Still, she emphasized that journal prestige and impact cannot be overlooked, as they often ensure rigorous peer review and professional editing — both crucial to research quality.
The situation also varies by discipline. In semiotics, for instance, open access publishing is relatively straightforward. The field’s oldest peer-reviewed journal, Sign Systems Studies, has long been freely available, and the other key journal, Semiotica, also became openly accessible last year.
“I believe it’s just as important to make research accessible in the native language,” Madisson added, “because that allows it to reach people who aren’t comfortable with English.” Both Madisson and Piirimäe stressed that true accessibility goes beyond removing paywalls — it also requires explaining research outcomes to the broader public.
Future depends on changing the system
A long-term solution doesn’t lie in isolated publishing agreements, but in reforming the business model and evaluation principles of academic research. According to Marko Piirsoo, the focus must shift away from measuring researchers’ success primarily by the prestige of the journals they publish in — often represented by the impact factor. “Let’s be honest — just because an article is published in Nature doesn’t automatically make its content better or worse,” he said.
The Estonian Research Council (ETAg) has joined the Europe-wide CoARA coalition, which advocates for exactly this kind of change. So far, no Estonian university has followed suit. ETAg also sees promise in the European Commission’s open-access publishing platform, Open Research Europe, and in the so-called Rights Retention Strategy, which allows researchers to freely share the manuscript version of their article regardless of publisher restrictions.
Still, these newer platforms come with practical challenges. For example, researchers may not find articles published on Open Research Europe in key academic databases, reducing the articles’ visibility.
Piirsoo acknowledges that the current business model of major publishers is predatory, but says their influence in European institutions — thanks to intense lobbying — is too great to confront alone. “I fully agree with the international research community — this is a predatory business scheme. But the lobbying publishers do within European institutions is extremely powerful,” he said. As a result, the only path forward is pan-European cooperation.
At the same time, ETAg has no plans to impose stricter open-access mandates on researchers in the near future. “Today, the answer is clearly no. We don’t want to increase the administrative burden on researchers or limit their freedom of choice,” Piirsoo confirmed.
While open access to research articles is important, he pointed to an even greater challenge. “When I think about open science, articles are just one piece of the puzzle — and not even the most important one,” he said. “Nowadays, as science becomes increasingly data-driven, it’s data accessibility and open research infrastructure that are still far more underdeveloped than open-access journals.”
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