From price to principles
Francesca Brazzorotto explains why OA agreements are no longer just about access
Open access agreements were never meant to be simple procurement exercises. Yet for years, discussions around them have focused largely on cost, coverage, and compliance – necessary considerations, but increasingly insufficient.
In the latest episode of Karger in Conversation, we stepped back from the spreadsheets to ask a more uncomfortable question: what kind of scholarly publishing system are these agreements actually shaping? And just as importantly, who is responsible for the values embedded in them?
With perspectives from Anna Vernon (Jisc), Petra Labriga (ZB MED), and Rob Johnson (Research Consulting), moderated by Chris Box (Karger), the conversation explored how open access and transformative agreements are becoming instruments that influence research culture, integrity, participation, and trust, whether intentionally or not.
Where value meets researcher reality
One of the clearest messages from the conversation was that the definition of value is shifting. For institutions facing intense financial pressure, price remains critical. But libraries and consortia are increasingly expected to justify not only how much they spend, but what their spending enables. As Anna Vernon noted, this includes whether agreements genuinely lower barriers to publishing, avoid reinforcing volume-driven behaviour, and support participation across institutions with very different capacities.
At the same time, the discussion grounded these ambitions in reality. As Petra Labriga emphasised, researchers still operate within career systems driven by journal prestige, impact factors, and rankings, particularly in medicine and the life sciences, where academic freedom to publish where one chooses remains deeply embedded. This creates a persistent tension: libraries may negotiate with systemic change in mind, but researchers publish within incentive structures they did not design and cannot easily escape.
What emerged is a growing recognition that access plus APC coverage is no longer enough. Open access agreements sit uncomfortably in the middle, expected to transform the system while constrained by forces far upstream, and value is increasingly tied to outcomes that are harder to quantify, and harder to negotiate.
Participation and scale in open access
As Rob Johnson pointed out, focusing on how much content is open risks obscuring who is excluded: by language, geography, funding availability, or institutional capacity. As he put it, “if we just think about how much content is open, that’s a very narrow way of framing the problem – what really matters is who is able to participate in the system.” High OA output does not automatically translate into equitable participation.
At the same time, the discussion recognised that open access agreements have materially changed the conditions for participation, reducing barriers and enabling far broader engagement with OA publishing than was previously possible. They have become powerful drivers of progress: accelerating the transition to OA at scale, reducing friction for researchers, and helping move openness from the margins into the mainstream. The challenge now is not whether these agreements work, but how they can evolve to support participation and quality more deliberately.
Research integrity, speed, and the limits of metrics
Research integrity emerged not as a crisis narrative, but as a structural issue closely tied to incentives, speed, and scale. As Rob Johnson noted, integrity is shaped long before a manuscript reaches a journal: by research culture, funding pressures, and career incentives, while business models that reward volume place sustained strain on peer review and editorial oversight.
Speed of publication remains a legitimate priority for researchers, but simplistic performance metrics risk creating perverse incentives. Faster does not automatically mean lower quality, and norms vary widely by discipline. While open access agreements cannot solve research integrity, they can demand greater transparency through clearer workflows, accountability, and communication channels, one of the few areas where consortia and libraries can exert meaningful influence without reducing quality to easily gamed metrics.
Where the answers end, the work begins
If one conclusion stood out, it was this: open access does not lend itself to a single, universal model. The discussion made clear that even well-intentioned approaches, including Diamond OA, raise questions around sustainability, governance, and academic freedom when applied in isolation or mandated from above. What matters, then, is not convergence but care: recognising that agreements shape behaviour, culture, and trust. Conversations like Karger in Conversation matter not because they resolve tension, but because they make it visible, creating the space where more thoughtful, responsible choices can begin.
About Karger in Conversation
Karger in Conversation is a free quarterly online event series created by Karger Publishers, bringing together voices from academia, publishing, research, and industry to explore the trends, tensions, and transformations shaping scholarly communication and the future of science.
Francesca Brazzorotto is Customer Engagement Manager at Karger Publishers
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