'Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Jonny Coates. Jonny, originally an immunologist, is a leading expert in preprints and metascience, focusing on science communication, trust, and research culture reform.'
Extracts below. Full text: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/14/guest-post-from-open-acce...
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For more than two decades, the open access (OA) movement has been one of the most influential reform efforts in scholarly communication. It reshaped policies, business models, and expectations around the dissemination of research. Yet the movement has also faced persistent criticism, including from longtime observer and journalist Richard Poynder, who in 2023 announced that he would no longer cover open access after concluding that the movement had failed to achieve its original goals.
In an ebook outlining his reasoning, Poynder argued that open access not only fell short of its ambitions, but in some cases produced unintended consequences, including the rise of predatory publishing, the normalization of pay-to-publish models, growing inequities, and new opportunities for publishers to extract revenue through “double dipping”...
I revisit Poynder’s arguments about why OA faltered to examine if the preprint community is at risk of repeating some of the same mistakes and how it might course correct.
Argument 1: Advocates did not take ownership of their own movement and allowed co-option by legacy publishers...
Argument 2: Lack of sustainability...
Argument 3: Mandates and top-down control...
Argument 4: No overarching strategy...
Argument 5: Loss of evidence-driven approaches and objectivity...
Argument 6: Reform movements act independently...
The experience of open access suggests several lessons for the future development of preprints.
Community governance matters. Infrastructure that remains under academic or non-profit control is less likely to be reshaped purely by commercial incentives. This also helps to ground any efforts in genuinely serving researcher needs.
Equity must be considered early rather than retroactively. Funding models built around author payments risk reproducing the same structural inequalities already visible in APC-funded open access. It is vital that a global approach is taken, which actively includes voices from regions beyond Western Europe and the USA...
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HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org