Redefining publishing: why we’re moving beyond the article
The current publishing system doesn’t reflect how science is done – or how it should be assessed, writes Iain Hrynaszkiewicz
In scholarly publishing, we tend to take persistent identifiers for granted today, but they didn’t always exist. Before widespread adoption of persistent identifiers, such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), linking to digital content was patchy, citations were inconsistent, and 404 errors were common. The introduction of persistent identifiers gave scholarly objects a stable, machine-readable identifier and, within a decade, became a standard across a large part of the industry. Crossref’s success proves what’s possible when the community works together.
The trajectory of ORCID – a persistent identifier for people rather than outputs – has similarities. It gained early support from across the ecosystem, including integrations into research publishing, such as into the submission systems of our journals at PLOS, and sharing infrastructure, which helped drive widespread uptake and normalise its use within existing workflows.
Other scholarly communication innovations follow the same pattern of collaboration around a common problem: transparent contributor roles through CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), research data sharing, and early sharing of research through preprints. These features are now part of how many researchers publish. Yet none of these shifts happened overnight. They were developed in response to gaps the community saw, and took hold because funders, publishers, institutions and others aligned around them. They show how we can – together – reshape how we track, share, and recognise research.
Recognition, which overly focuses on research articles and journal prestige, remains a major challenge: the incentive system that governs research communication is increasingly misaligned with what researchers, research institutions, and funders value, and how science is done. Recognising all research contributions should be the next big shift in scholarly communication. This is a systemic problem that publishers are not positioned to solve alone – but publishers can contribute to a solution if they are collaborative partners, willing to experiment.
Redefining publishing
In 2024, PLOS announced an 18-month project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, to redefine research publishing as a lever for systemic change. We aim to demonstrate that new publishing models centred on equity, recognition, and sustainability can shift how open science is shared, evaluated, and paid for. This includes developing what we call the “knowledge stack”: a new publishing concept that makes research outputs equally visible, linked, and credited across the research lifecycle, supported by a sustainable, non-article-processing charge (APC) business model.
As well as user-focused research and design, economic analysis and business model-development, and reviews of the literature, the project has enabled us to convene and speak to research funders and academic leaders in the EU & UK, North America, and Asia (with consultations involving stakeholders in Africa and Latin America to follow soon). What we’ve found so far is growing momentum but also significant variability.
The open science advantage
For institutions, aligning with open science isn’t just about meeting funder mandates. It’s an opportunity to increase research visibility, strengthen integrity, and build competitive advantage.
Transparency and reproducibility are key drivers of open science uptake. As one institutional leader in North America told us, “open science is the best way of building the scientific literature in a way that you can either reproduce, remix, or replicate the results…you can build on top of other people’s results.”
Research integrity is also why leaders internationally are integrating open science practices, ultimately recognising this as “better science…discouraging bad practices arising from the publish or perish culture.”
When research is as open as possible, we can accelerate discovery, enabling those institutions adopting these practices to demonstrate leadership, catalyse innovation, and increase competitiveness.
Global insights on assessment
Most initiatives relevant to open science and research assessment are currently in their infancy, especially outside of the EU and UK.
In Asia, for instance, open science policies are just beginning to influence research assessment frameworks. In Japan, a national mandate for open access and open data came into effect in 2025, but research assessment reform is still in early planning stages. In China, the government is initiating efforts to expand its research evaluation framework, enabling the reporting of datasets and data papers. Meanwhile, in North America, although many federal research funders have had public access and data sharing policies in effect for several years, integration of these new sharing practices into research assessment frameworks at academic institutions appears to be proceeding in a decentralised fashion, mostly at the departmental level.
Across all regions, the journal article remains the central measure of academic recognition. Entrenched cultural norms prevent a shift from journal prestige, and variance in disciplinary norms makes it difficult for leaders to devise a unified assessment framework that is equitable for all researchers.
Even advocates told us they feel constrained, and mentors are reluctant to break with the established “rules of the game as it is now,” if they want early career researchers to succeed and thrive. The competition for funding and recruitment traps institutions in the status quo, and disincentivises becoming a first mover.
Recognition beyond the article supports a change in research evaluation
Open science requires and enables recognition of a broader range of contributions, such as data and code. Despite the constraints on rapid change, our conversations point to growth in the importance of contributions both before and after the article.
There are also practical barriers to overcome: assessors cite lack of time, expertise, heuristics or convenient indicators or tools for evaluating diverse outputs in areas where they may not be experts themselves, supporting previous research by PLOS, and others. While not every research output needs traditional peer review, we’re hearing that everything needs context for its audience, ideally with metadata, and signals of impacts, such as reuse, with clarity about who has contributed and how.
A complete record of research
Part of our approach is to consider what would make a “knowledge stack” valuable to end users and stakeholders, including how making research outputs visible and connected can enable these contributions to be evaluated and rewarded.
This offers greater opportunities for early career researchers, recognising risk-taking, failures, early-stage outputs, and their pathways to impact, while enabling funders, institutions, and reviewers opportunities to monitor and reward responsible and open research practices.
We have heard repeatedly in our interviews and in-person convenings that the knowledge stack is a disruptive innovation that could help to spur the progress of research assessment reform. As one convening participant put it, “What you are proposing is what the future of science should look like. PLOS are the right people to be doing this.”
There are many questions to resolve: our iterative learning journey is helping us determine what researchers, institutions, and funders need to make this a success. Questions remain about the design to ensure interoperability and attribution at the contributor level. And what we implement must neatly fit into existing researcher workflows if it is to be widely adopted. Ultimately, there needs to be a critical mass of adoption of a publishing system that goes beyond the article and beyond the APC by many publishers – not just PLOS – as well as institutions and funders, and of course, researchers, globally, for the system-wide impact we seek.
Get involved
This is a rare opportunity to create a blueprint for the future of research communication. We’re currently engaging with institutions, funders, researchers, and infrastructure providers who could help shape the knowledge stack, and inform an equitable, non ‘APC’ business model designed to foster a more inclusive, transparent, and collaborative system. If you’re interested in contributing insight, testing ideas, or exploring a partnership to help us achieve momentum for open science, we invite you to get in touch.
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz is Director, Open Research Solutions, at PLOS. The author thanks PLOS colleagues for their help in preparing the initial draft of this article.