PVLF 2026

Harvard Champions Affordable Open Access Publishing

Harvard leads a global shift toward open access publishing, launching new models to make academic research freely available and sustainable.
on Oct 31, 2025

When Nora Y. Sun '27 tried to submit her research for publication in the January of her freshman year, she lacked the funds.

Sun said she intended to send her work to an open-access journal — a type of journal where accepted pieces are freely available to the public and don't require a fee to read. She said this was 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. The fees can hit $40 or more to read an individual article.

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

One long-standing concern for researchers has been the high cost to publish open access-and those prices continue to rise. 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 unlimited, 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

Supporters of open access scholarship believe the business model behind academic publishing is the 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 pay, publishers are able to charge exorbitant costs to academic libraries, Gershman said, 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, and home to America's largest academic library — the 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 spokesperson at Harvard Library did not respond to requests about how much the library pays annually in subscription costs and what cancellations it has had this year. But Library Journal’s annual Periodicals Price Survey finds the escalating 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, 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 received an e-mail from Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard, 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 deposit an article in 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 do not 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 consolidates the open access articles written by its faculty under DASH, Digital Access for Scholarship at Harvard, a free online repository built using open-source software featuring over 58,000 scholarly texts.

DASH averages eight million downloads of its content every 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 serves 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 leads DASH, also administered the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity fund, which assisted in subsidizing 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 that support can still be found elsewhere at Harvard. Edwards, curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, said though he has applied to the HOPE fund “a few times,” he also draws from the internal museum fund designated for researchers.

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

Usually, the student researchers are associated with the institutions of their mentors, whose funds they can use to cover the publication costs of their work. According to Bartz, many open access studies published by her lab are 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 provides publishing services, web hosting, and seed funding for University affiliates to launch 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 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, at a minimum 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. Funding from Harvard for Open Mind only stretches through 2027, although it may be renewable. The journal's editors view the support as temporary — and they're trying to keep costs as low as possible in a bid to make their model sustainable. Contributors and peer reviewers at Open Mind don't get paid, said Gershman, and the journal doesn't publish a print edition. With efficient operations and university support, some scholars believe that open access can become the new norm 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.