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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen Nora Y. Sun ’27 sought to submit her research for publication in the January of her freshman year, she didn’t have the funds.

Sun intended to send her work to an open access journal — where accepted pieces are freely available to the public and do not require a fee to read — because she wanted to “spread it among the academic community.”

Publishing behind a paywall often makes it prohibitively expensive for the general public, as well as members of institutions without subscriptions to the journal in question, to view new research. Fees to read an individual article can hit $40 or more.

But publishing open access typically requires much heftier payments per article, often numbering in the thousands of dollars, that land on the shoulders of researchers themselves. Some of the most prestigious journals, like Nature, charge upward of $10,000.

The high cost of publishing open access is one that has plagued researchers for years — and prices are only rising. Between 2019 and 2023, article processing charges for open access publications in six of the major publishers of scientific journals nearly tripled: spending on APCs has gone from $910.3 million to $2.5 billion over the five years, according to a 2024 study.

At Harvard, a dedicated group of scientists and librarians have tried to alleviate the costs of publishing — and the University has a history of backing efforts to move away from the pay-to-publish model entirely.

Thanks to a novel copyright arrangement that Harvard’s schools pioneered in 2008, affiliated researchers can deposit their papers in DASH, a database that makes them freely available to anyone in the world. Harvard Library has also launched the Harvard Open Journals Project, which provides funding for researchers to create their own open access journals — a prospect that may be cheaper than making work freely available in existing journals.

“Harvard’s funds are extremely useful, but they’re not limitless, and they certainly can’t cover all the research that is published by the University,” said Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Scott V. Edwards ’86. “So that’s why we need alternative mechanisms.”

‘Huge Profit Margins’

Proponents of open access scholarship say the business model of academic publishing is a big problem — but it’s not the only option.

The current model, said Psychology professor Samuel J. Gershman, is“fundamentally exploitative in the sense that there are large corporate publishers that basically get content produced for free.”

While contributors and peer reviewers often work without formal pay, publishers are able to charge exorbitant costs to academic libraries, said Gershman, who now helps run an open access journal funded by Harvard and MIT.

“They’re earning huge profit margins because we’ve all kind of acquiesced to a system in which we provide free services to corporations. Part of the open access movement is an attempt to break that,” Gershman said.

Even at Harvard — the richest university in the United States, which boasts America’s largest academic library — subscription costs add up. In 2012, Harvard Library’s faculty advisory council sent a memo to teaching and research staff across the University, saying it was getting harder to foot the bill for the rising price of subscriptions — to the tune of more than $3.5 million that year.

“This is something even sophisticated scholars don’t understand,” said Peter Suber, Harvard Library’s senior adviser for open access. “They just assume that, because Harvard is so wealthy, which it is, that it does subscribe to everything — but it never has subscribed to everything.”

“And in fact, it cancels journals every year for budgetary reasons alone. It would like to subscribe to everything, but it can’t afford to subscribe to everything,” he said.

A Harvard Library spokesperson did not respond to inquiries about annual subscription costs and cancellations this year. But Library Journal’s annual Periodicals Price Survey has found that the rising cost of periodical subscriptions generally outpaces the Consumer Price Index — with journal prices expected to rise more than 5.5 percent in 2026.

Yuan Li, Harvard Library’s Director of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services in Harvard Library, said high subscription costs are a global issue — often shutting researchers in developing countries out of scholarly conversations.

“Access is important to not only academics, but to the whole world, for the public good,” Li said.

Harvard Leads the Way

By the mid-2000s, Suber — a former philosophy professor at Earlham College in Indiana — had stepped down from his tenured position to become one of the world’s leading advocates for open access scholarship. In 2001, while he was still at Earlham, Suber helped draft the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the first major global statement on open access.

A few years later, he got a message from Harvard Computer Science professor Stuart M. Shieber, who had a project of his own: developing Harvard’s first open access policy.

Together, Shieber and Suber drafted a motion that would require Harvard to deposit faculty members’ scholarly articles in an open access repository. In February 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to approve it.

One by one, the rest of Harvard’s nine schools voted to follow suit — the Law School in May 2008, the Graduate School of Education in June, and finally Harvard Medical School in 2014.

The open access policies mean that by default, Harvard has the right to distribute faculty published work for non-commercial uses, including after the work has been published in journals behind paywalls.

“That way, when they submit an article to the repository, the University already does have permission to share it,” said Suber. “We don’t have to look it up in a database. We don’t have to plead with the publisher for permission.”

“It’s a beautiful solution,” he added.

The policy leaves a loophole for faculty who want to use it: they can opt out of open access for specific articles, no-questions-asked. The option is designed to benefit researchers, especially junior faculty, who hope to publish papers in prestigious journals that don’t allow them to simultaneously make their work available for free.

In the years since, Suber said, he’s helped a hundred other universities adopt open access policies like Harvard’s.

Today, Harvard centralizes its faculty members’ open access articles under DASH, Digital Access for Scholarship at Harvard, a free online repository built with open-source software that houses more than 58,000 scholarly texts.

DASH sees an average of eight million downloads of its content each year. Suber, who began managing the office that oversees the repository in 2013, said that its reach is wide: Most of its visitors come from public search engines, where DASH articles are indexed.

“People don’t have to know that we even have a repository, and they don’t have to know what’s in there,” Suber said. “They just have to run a search on Google.”

Edwards, who sits on Harvard Library’s faculty advising board, said DASH is particularly valuable for students and early-career researchers, whose work might be quicker to gain traction if other scientists don’t have to navigate hefty paywalls to read it.

“It’s good for graduate students and postdocs, because their work can actually get cited before they have to pay some big fee to a journal to have it open access,” he said.

Making Up the Difference

Harvard’s Open Scholarship and Research Data Services office, which oversees DASH, also managed the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity fund, which helped subsidize Harvard researchers publishing their work in open access journals that charge processing fees.

The fund was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic — though a page about it remains active online, stating that the fund “has reached its annual budgetary limit and is not accepting new applications for the remainder of the year.”

But researchers can still find other sources of support at Harvard. Edwards, who curates the Museum of Comparative Zoology, said that though he has applied for the HOPE fund “a few times,” he also draws from the museum’s internal fund for researchers.

Deborah A. Bartz, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an OB-GYN at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said she receives support for open access publication from either her grants or from the hospital.

Typically, student researchers are affiliated with their mentors’ institutions and can draw on their funds for help getting their work published. Bartz said that many of the open access studies published by her lab include research led by medical students, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduates.

But Sun’s case is an unusual one. Because her work is largely self-guided, it is not covered by her mentors’ grants.

Without funding, Sun has had to cut her work down from a full-length manuscript to a shorter report piece, which are cheaper to publish. She has also turned to programs like the Harvard College Research Program, which provides stipends to student researchers for their time working in labs. Sun used her stipend to fund her work’s publication.

A New Model

Some Harvard scholars have decided the solution is not to pay publishers to put out open access work — but to start new, entirely open access publications. In April 2024, Harvard launched the Harvard Open Journals Project, which offers publishing services, web hosting, and seed funding for University affiliates to start their own open access journals.

The first journal to be supported by the program, Open Mind, is a collaboration between Harvard and MIT’s library systems and the MIT Press. It publishes open access research in psychology and cognitive science.

Gershman, one of Open Mind’s editors, said that it was created as “part of a broader movement to make scholarship openly accessible” — and wrest control back from publishers. Open Mind, he said, models an entirely different ethos of academic exchange.

“Instead of making everybody pay each other in a big circle, we just get rid of people paying each other at all,” Gershman said. “And that means everyone’s doing something for free.”

“Personally, I’d like to live in a world where we uphold prosocial community values where the academic community is essentially supporting each other without putting money into the pockets of corporations,” he added.

When Open Mind was founded in 2017, authors still had to pay to publish their work open access, with a minimum cost of about $1,000 per article. In 2022, when Gershman joined as an editor, the journal moved to a diamond open access model, where neither author nor reader had to pay.

“Once we got some funding from Harvard and from MIT to cover this for a few years, then we started getting an awful lot more submissions,” said Edward A. Gibson, Gershman’s co-editor and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

Open Mind’s funding from Harvard only stretches through 2027, though it might be renewable. The journal’s editors see the support as temporary — and they’re trying to keep costs as low as possible to make their model sustainable. Gershman said that contributors and peer reviewers at Open Mind are not paid, and the journal does not publish a print edition.

With efficient operations and support from universities, some scholars think open access can become the new standard in academic publishing.

“The bottom line is, it can be done for much cheaper than what the science journals are charging,” said Edwards, who sits on Harvard Library’s faculty advisory board.

“Really what we’re paying for with the science journals is, we’re paying for the prestige of publishing in that journal,” he said. “But, we think that we can probably recoup a lot of that prestige with the Harvard name on it.”

“It’s very exciting, and it’s great that Harvard is leading in this area,” he added.

—Staff writer Sophie Gao can be reached at sophie.gao@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Anna Shao can be reached at anna.shao@thecrimson.com.