Alternative Publishing Models Beyond APC

Updated 17 August 2025

The paper highlights the feasibility and benefits of alternative publishing models by analyzing consortium funding, green OA, and diamond approaches.
Alternative publishing models are strategies that enable open access by bypassing APC fees through centralized funding, self-archiving, and peer-to-peer infrastructures.
These models offer practical solutions to overcome financial barriers and systemic inequities, ensuring broader participation and sustainable scholarly communication.

Alternative publishing models beyond Article Processing Charges (APC) are strategies and platforms that facilitate the dissemination of scholarly work without requiring authors or their funders to pay direct fees per article for open access. These models respond to the financial, equity, and sustainability challenges posed by APC-driven systems, especially as open access (OA) publishing becomes increasingly dominant. With the proliferation of digital technology and evolving policy norms, various alternatives have emerged to address cost barriers, ensure broader participation, and preserve peer review integrity.

1. Rationale and Critique of APC-Based Models

The APC-based model remains the most visible open access approach, especially in Gold OA publishing. In this system, authors/affiliated institutions pay a fee typically ranging from $900 to over$10,000 (with mean APC values for Gold OA journals near $2,987 and standard deviation$1,352 (Kudelić, 2023)) to ensure their article is freely available to all readers. However, several papers highlight critical drawbacks:

Barriers to participation: APCs restrict access for researchers from low- and lower-middle-income countries, early-career scientists, and those from less well-funded disciplines. Discounts were shown insufficient to motivate uptake among resource-constrained groups, whereas full waivers do improve participation but leave deeper structural inequities unresolved (Momeni et al., 2022, Nazarovets, 17 May 2025).
Inequitable citation and prestige cycles: OA confers a notable citation advantage (e.g., OA articles sometimes accrue 68% more citations or up to fivefold in collaborative, grant-supported settings (Hook et al., 2019)). If only well-funded researchers can afford APCs, visibility and career progression become strongly correlated with financial resources, creating what the literature terms a “paytocracy” (Kudelić, 2023).
Cost inefficiency: Institutions and libraries confront high recurring costs, whether through subscriptions or APCs. The transition from one model to another may shift, rather than resolve, financial burdens (Levesque et al., 2019, Nazarovets et al., 2019).

2. Consortium and Collective Funding Models

To relieve individual authors from payment responsibility and stabilize peer review funding, European physicists have pioneered the SCOAP3 consortium model (0705.3466). In this system:

Libraries and funding agencies centrally reallocate existing subscription budgets to cover "pay to publish" fees, making publication costs “invisible” to the author.
The system aims for efficiency, transparency, and transition management (3–5 year transitional period), and avoids double charging when properly implemented, targeting publication costs in the range $\$900\leq C_{article}\leq \$3000$.</li> <li>The approach is especially suited to fields with strong preprint cultures (e.g., arXiv in HEP), and provides a blueprint for potential adoption in other disciplines with established eprint repositories.</li> </ul> <p>Consortia, such as national or institutional agreements (“Projekt Deal,” “Read & Publish”), also negotiate collective funding, bundling access and publication fees (<a href="/papers/1908.00288" title="" rel="nofollow" data-turbo="false" class="assistant-link" x-data x-tooltip.raw="">Nazarovets et al., 2019</a>). While potentially cost-effective and more equitable, effectiveness depends on sufficient public investment and clear policy alignment.</p> <h2 class='paper-heading' id='self-archiving-and-green-open-access'>3. Self-Archiving and Green Open Access</h2> <p>Self-archiving, or <strong>Green OA</strong>, allows authors to deposit preprints or postprints in institutional or subject repositories (e.g., arXiv, PubMed Central), enabling wide dissemination with minimal cost (<a href="/papers/1808.06130" title="" rel="nofollow" data-turbo="false" class="assistant-link" x-data x-tooltip.raw="">Thibault et al., 2018</a>, <a href="/papers/1905.00880" title="" rel="nofollow" data-turbo="false" class="assistant-link" x-data x-tooltip.raw="">Hook et al., 2019</a>). Key aspects include:</p> <ul> <li>Infrastructure costs are low (arXiv has served over a million e-prints on a budget near $1M annually (Thibault et al., 2018)).
The decoupling of dissemination from publisher-controlled access removes paywalls and reduces publication delays, benefiting both visibility and citation rates.
Peer review can remain journal-driven or be handled separately (overlay journals add peer review to repositories).
Adoption depends on researcher awareness, institutional mandates (often tied to performance evaluations), and cultural inertia, with uptake uneven across disciplines.

A simple comparative model is:

$C_\text{APC} = N \times F_\text{APC}, \quad C_\text{SA} = R + N \times C_\text{process}$

where $R$ is fixed repository cost, $C_\text{process}$ is nominal per-article processing, $F_\text{APC}$ is the APC fee, and $N$ is the number of articles. As $C_\text{SA} \ll C_\text{APC}$ , self-archiving offers substantial cost efficiency (Thibault et al., 2018).

Diamond or Platinum OA models eliminate both author and reader payments by sourcing funding from institutional, governmental, or philanthropic support (Maddi, 2021, Momeni et al., 2022).

Funding may come from university budgets, library consortia, research councils, or explicit grants. Journals curate research without APCs, lowering participation barriers.
Waiver schemes, where APCs are automatically or transparently waived for authors from least developed countries (LDCs), demonstrate economic feasibility (e.g., Springer-Nature for LDCs, with an annual global revenue impact near $1.1M for 520 articles, or 0.26% of output (Taubert et al., 2020)).
Tiered discounts, while common, are shown to be less effective than full waivers; discounts rarely induce significant increases in Gold OA uptake among lower-middle-income researchers (Momeni et al., 2022, Nazarovets, 17 May 2025).
Successful diamond OA platforms are often community-managed or publicly funded (e.g., Peer Community In, Open Research Europe (Kayal et al., 2021)).

5. Distributed and Peer-to-Peer Publishing Infrastructures

Decentralized models such as Academia 2.0 posit the elimination of traditional publishers using distributed digital networks (Poss et al., 2014). Key technical elements:

Document handles: Content-based cryptographic identifiers with time-stamped certificates of existence.
Dual storage networks: Institutional repositories assure reliable archiving, while peer-to-peer networks (e.g., BitTorrent-inspired hash tables) support robust, global replication.
Reviews become first-class, publishable objects, enhancing post-publication evaluation and accountability.
Journals operate as curated queries on distributed indices, shifting value from access control to services (e.g., matchmaking, moderation).

These models enable low-cost, rapid dissemination, modular publication (including negative results), and inherent persistence, especially when integrated with existing platforms (arXiv, PKP).

6. Hybrid, Freemium, and Accelerated OA Models

Hybrid models: Journals offer both subscription and open access tracks, allowing market competition to moderate costs (Kudelić, 2023, Levesque et al., 2019). Increasing OA penetration reduces subscription obligations but can create accounting complexity (“double dipping”).
Freemium models: Basic article formats are free (HTML/text), with optional paid enhancements (PDF, supplementary data) (Maddi, 2021).
Accelerated OA publishing: Emerging publishers (e.g., MDPI) compete with legacy publishers by offering lower APCs, faster turnaround (review times), and greater accessibility (Kopitar et al., 9 Nov 2024). These models can democratize access but may challenge traditional evaluation systems and perceived prestige. The resulting publication patterns show marked divergence between countries and institutions with different resource levels or strategic priorities.

Replicator dynamics from evolutionary game theory have been applied to model researcher choices in these environments:

$\frac{d\omega}{dt} = \omega (1-\omega)(\lambda - k\omega)$

where $\omega$ is the fraction of researchers choosing OA, $\lambda$ represents external incentives, and $k$ encodes diminishing returns when OA adoption is high (Kopitar et al., 9 Nov 2024).

7. Transformative Agreements and Structural Considerations

Transformative agreements integrate subscription and OA costs, aiming for sustainable transitions. Effective models include “Read & Publish” contracts, bundling access and publication fees (Nazarovets et al., 2019, Momeni et al., 2022). However, empirical analyses show:

National science funding in transforming economies often lags required OA publication costs, risking marginalization of authors as consumers rather than producers (Nazarovets et al., 2019).
Equitable pricing must account for national economic status, with tiered APC models and persistent policy development to prevent the formation of exclusionary, two-tier systems.

8. Future Directions, Challenges, and Evaluation

Analysis of OA publishing trends reveals:

Rapid progress toward OA parity, but market turbulence and historic world events influence adoption rates and accessibility (Kudelić, 2023).
Exclusive reliance on APC-based Gold OA risks meritocratic erosion, increased predatory practices, and systemic inequities.
The coexistence of multiple publishing models—inclusive OA consortia, self-archiving, hybrid approaches, and diamond OA—enhances resilience, equity, and meritocracy in scientific dissemination (Kudelić, 2023, Maddi, 2021).

Summary Table: Major Alternative Publishing Models and Core Features

Model	Cost to Author	Peer Review Managed By	Accessibility
Consortium (SCOAP3)	None	Journals/Consortium	Immediate OA
Green OA	None	Journals or Community	Immediate/Embargo OA
Diamond OA	None	Public/Community	Immediate OA
Hybrid/Freemium	Variable	Journals	Mix OA/subscription
Peer-to-Peer	None	Distributed/Community	Immediate OA

In conclusion, alternative publishing models beyond APC enable a more equitable, efficient, and transparent scholarly communication system. Their diverse technical and economic architectures—ranging from consortia and diamond OA to self-archiving and distributed infrastructures—provide solutions that address fundamental issues in the APC-dominated regime, particularly around inclusivity, peer review integrity, cost allocation, and systemic sustainability. The literature demonstrates that strategic diversification of publishing models is essential to preserve research diversity, meritocracy, and universal access.