How audit rules and public infrastructure could break science’s publishing monopolies. An English version of my post for the Verfassungsblog from December 19, 2025.
Scientific journals that feel straight out of 1665, prices that could come from a MrBeast meet-and-greet, privacy as lax as Facebook, and reliability as dubious as a TikTok lifehack: it was long past time for the EU to free science—if anyone would let it.
On “Palindrome Day” — 23 May 23 — something happened that few outside the world of science policy noticed, and even fewer expected. Under the anodyne title “The Hazards of Scholarly Publishing,” the Council of the European Union, in its 3949th session, adopted formal conclusions on scholarly publishing.
At first glance, this sounds like bureaucratic filler. What dangers could possibly lurk in the act of publishing research papers? Paper cuts? The analog era is long gone. And yet, as the Council implicitly recognized, it has not vanished nearly fast enough.
The central anachronism is still with us: commercial scientific publishers. These companies are leftovers from the age of printed journals, yet they continue to dominate the digital dissemination of research. After World War II, a shrewd businessman named Robert Maxwell spotted the profit potential of this niche. Through companies like Pergamon Press — now part of Elsevier — he helped turn scientific publishing into a gold mine. The legacy of those profits even extended, indirectly, to his daughter, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, whose financial independence — in part due to generous funding by university libraries — helped place her in the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein.
Profit over merit
This history matters because scientific publishing today remains one of the most profitable legal industries on Earth. Profit margins of up to 40 percent are routine. The EU Council identifies one core reason: publishers typically take control of researchers’ intellectual property. Since each scientific paper is published only once, this creates a built-in monopoly. With no real competition, publishers can charge prices that strain — or exceed — the budgets of public institutions.
At the same time, digitization has reduced publishing costs dramatically. Printing, shipping, and storage have essentially disappeared. However, prices were kept nearly constant, so libraries now pay up to ten times the actual cost of producing an article. The result is a system where public money flows steadily into private hands — with little to show for it.
Quality, for one, has not improved. Quite the opposite. Publishers have invested remarkably little in quality control or modern digital functionality. Many of the most expensive journals now publish some of the least reliable science. The so-called “replication crisis” has become so visible that even Donald Trump referenced it in a 2025 executive order on “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”
For authors, the submission process has barely evolved since email submissions were allowed in the early 1990s. Reviewers work largely pro bono and with minimal publisher support. And the final product — the scientific article — has about the same digital functionalities as a photographed tombstone.
If publishers charge ten times their costs, why do they “only” earn 40 percent profits instead of 90? Some of the answer lies in executive perks — private jets and luxury yachts do not come cheap. But another, more troubling investment has grown steadily: digital surveillance.
In 2021, a commission convened by the German Research Foundation warned that unregulated tracking on publisher platforms could violate academic freedom itself. This concern is not hypothetical. Together with the Society for Civil Rights, I have filed a data-protection complaint against unlawful data processing on publishers’ websites with the data-protection authority of Baden-Württemberg. Scientific publishers have quietly become global data brokers.
The EU tries to break the lock-in
Why has science tolerated this arrangement for so long? The answer is structural dependency. Early-career researchers, often precariously employed, must publish in established journals to have any chance at a permanent position. Libraries, in turn, must subscribe to those same journals so researchers can read and cite them. The EU Council aptly calls this a “lock-in.”
The lock-in benefits those who publish in the most expensive — pardon, the most prestigious — journals. And of course these authors pass this lesson on to their students: if you want to stay in science, publish in prestigious journals first, worry about reliability second – or not at all. The perverse outcome is that the journals most rewarded by the system are often those producing the least reliable results. In cancer research, only about 12 percent of findings can be reproduced. No deep knowledge of evolutionary biology is needed to see how that can happen: selection pressure rewards visibility, not quality.
When the EU warns of “the hazards of scholarly publishing,” it is not fretting about excessive footnotes. It is pointing to wasted public funds, violations of fundamental rights through data tracking, and an incentive structure that systematically rewards unreliable science while penalizing rigor. Above all, it is pointing to a dependency that has left science unable to reform itself.
The Council’s proposed remedy is strikingly direct. Member states and the Commission are urged “to invest in and foster interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures for publishing based on open source software and open standards, in order to avoid the lock-in of services as well as proprietary systems, and to connect these infrastructures to the EOSC” (European Open Science Cloud). Translated into plain language: replace commercial journals with public infrastructure.
This infrastructure would handle not only articles, but also data, software, and code. It would prioritize quality assurance, functionality, and accessibility — not profit. And it is already taking shape. Since 2023, the EU-funded platform Open Research Europe has begun operating. From 2026 onward, researchers from participating countries will be able to publish there without fees. The platform is being rebuilt entirely on open-source software, with a decentralized architecture that institutions across Europe can help maintain.
In just two years, the EU has moved from declarations to implementation — achieving more than commercial publishers have in decades.
Follow this path to its logical conclusion, and the ambition becomes clear: to break publishing monopolies entirely, replacing journals as they have existed since 1665 with a decentralized, public system. Given the failures of the current model, this is not radical. It is overdue.
Even before the Council’s conclusions, many scientists — myself included — had been calling for a science-led alternative. In that sense, the EU’s decision is a rare example of evidence-based policy done right. Where science has become trapped, the European Commission has offered a way out.
But infrastructure alone will not suffice. A replacement does not automatically become the default. Authors today are not truly free to choose where they publish, and incentives will not change on their own.
Merit over exclusivity
Two additional steps could help. First, research funders could require institutional support for Open Research Europe — and for local implementations of its infrastructure — as a condition of grants. This would not be unprecedented; funders already impose many technical and administrative requirements on the institutions they support. This move would increase and broaden support for a journal replacement, while simultaneously drawing funds and attention away from the deprecated legacy journals.
Second, audit courts (government accountability offices, GAOs) could intervene. To this day, many institutions negotiate individually with legacy publishers. Historically, this made legal sense: publishers controlled exclusive access and hence enjoyed the “single-source exemption from procurement rules”. Today, they provide standardized publication services. Most already use the same technical formats, such as the JATS standard. This makes services substitutable — and substitutability triggers competitive procurement rules.
Audit courts/GAOs should therefore require institutions to put publication services out to public tender, just as they do for IT hardware or cleaning contracts, or pretty much anything else. The European Commission has already shown how this works. For its publishing needs as a public institution, rather than negotiating behind closed doors with major publishers, it conducted a competitive process. The result was Open Research Europe.
If audit courts/GAOs were to take on their responsibilities in this matter, scholarly institutions would have to treat their publishing needs as competitively and transparently as all their other procurement.
Some will object that academic freedom includes the freedom to choose where to publish. But this argument is easily countered in two ways. First, scholarly authors already lack meaningful choice, they need to publish where they must. Second, academic freedom rights are primarily a shield against state interference — not a blank check to fund practices that waste public money, violate rights, and undermine scientific reliability.
So those who still wish to publish in legacy journals should be free to do so — at their own expense. Once a robust alternative exists, it is unlikely many will choose otherwise. And without authors or funding, there will not be many journals left, where researchers can be forced to publish in.
The next step for Europe could now be to seek partners beyond its borders. As more institutions join a decentralized, nonprofit publishing network, others will follow — just as they did with the Internet in the 1990s. Scientific publishing could finally catch up to the digital age.
