On 23 May 2023, the European Council adopted conclusions that called for transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications. It argued for immediate and unrestricted access to published science that benefits from public funding.

The Council has reached an ethically sound conclusion – that paywalls around publicly funded scientific research should be taken down. We fully agree.

The question is not whether open access scientific publishing – but how. How can we expand those publishing models making rigorously peer reviewed research articles immediately accessible on publication, free to read and open to all?

Our starting point is that we need a range of options. A diversity of open access publishing models drives innovation and will better serve the diversity of our scientific communities. And the principles of open science have successfully been applied in a wide range of publishing contexts, with excellent return on investment and the careful stewardship of public funds. That evolution must be encouraged.

Commercial and non-profit models, including those backed by societies or research institutions, have demonstrated that open access publishing is effective at scale and can be applied universally. Competition, with price transparency, will help drive down cost, spur the amount of rigorous science accessible to all, help maintain rigorous quality safeguards, and nurture author choice.

Costs in publishing have historically been driven up by complicated, bundled, and opaque legacy models. These legacy models and their paywall systems have driven inequalities and become unsustainable.

Moreover, we agree with the Council that the cost to publish high quality science should not ultimately be borne by its authors.

We are not in principle wedded to article charges that fall to authors alone. The costs of open access publishing services should be transparent to authors but be borne by their funders or host institutions in the same way that subscription costs are now covered. That is why we have established more than 650 partnerships with institutions across the world who are committed to covering some or all of those costs.

Our work so far with institutions to create a centralized charging regime for services on a per article basis that tracks their costs – through for example Article Processing Charges for Gold Open Access – has been incredibly effective in bringing transparency to the publishing market with a business model that is cost-effective, commercially sustainable, and underpinned by private sector innovation.

But now we need to do more. So as a publisher, we stand ready to work with these institutions, and many more, to find the optimal, equitable and productive finance and funding model to publish robust science at scale.

We think scale matters. Tackling global existential threats will require more than incremental change. Good research published at scale and shared globally, with machine readability across large volumes of information, will accelerate scientific discovery and grow our chances of success.