To Serve Their Vital Role in the Research Ecosystem, Publishers Should Follow These Eight Principles

In 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, wrote about the importance of what he called the “scientific temper”: “the willingness to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not pre-conceived theory.” It is a temper that has sustained many, probably most, possibly all human creative advances. It is essential to humanity’s capacity to confront the contemporary global challenges of ecological breakdown, anthropogenic climate change, the potential and threat of AI, the need for multi-national agreement on nuclear weapons, and the imperative for sustainable development. These are challenges that more than ever need the adventurous and yet critical temper of science. (The word “science” is used here to refer not only to the natural sciences, but to research in the social sciences, many parts of the humanities, medicine and engineering—in other words, to all the disciplines promoted in a university.)

Science is concerned with the same phenomena that have taxed the human imagination from earliest times, but expressed and assessed in ways that make it a special form of knowledge. The routes that lead to claims of new scientific knowledge are many and various, rational or empirical, experimental or observational. Ultimately, however, all must satisfy the same test: that knowledge claims and the evidence on which they may be based are made widely available and formally tested against reality and logic through processes of sustained and organized scrutiny.

For an activity to qualify as science, it must fulfill these requirements. Science is a way of working, a process not an outcome, more of a verb than a noun. It is a route by which error is identified and rejected, rather than truth established. Openness to skeptical scrutiny is the basis of so-called “scientific self-correction,” eloquently expressed, in words often attributed to Albert Einstein, that “a thousand experiments cannot prove me right, but one experiment can prove me wrong.”

Ideas that fail this scrutiny, either before or after publication, fail to survive as part of the record of science. They are merely failed hypotheses, which may or may not be subsequently amended and resurrected to pass the test. It is the stark logic of science that its conclusions are provisional, whether they claim to reflect time-dependent or time-independent phenomena. It is a perspective evoked by Arthur Koestler (1967), who wrote, “The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories that once seemed to possess eternal life.” Science admits its uncertainties, in contrast to many in political life, and in the clamor of public debate, who claim certainty. Voltaire (1770/2017) recognized the dilemma when he wrote that whilst uncertainty is uncomfortable, certainty is preposterous. In the words that Berthold Brecht (1952/1994) put into the mouth of Galileo, the ”aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.”

The rapid, global circulation of ideas through publication has played and will continue to play a central and indispensable role in the scientific process. In recognition of this, the International Science Council set out eight principles for publishing that are essential if science is to be well served (2023).

EIGHT PRINCIPLES FOR SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING

1. There should be universal, prompt open access to the record of science (International Science Council, 2021), both for authors and readers, with no barriers to participation, in particular those based on ability to pay, institutional privilege, language or geography.
2. Scientific publications should have a default position of carrying open licenses that permit reuse and text and data mining.
3. Rigorous, timely and ongoing peer review must continue to play a key role in creating and maintaining the public record of science.
4. The data and observations on which a published truth claim is based should be concurrently accessible to scrutiny and supported by necessary metadata.
5. The record of science should be maintained in such a way as to ensure open access by future generations.
6. Publication traditions and bibliodiversities in different disciplines and regions should be respected.
7. Publication systems should be designed to continually adapt to new opportunities for beneficial change rather than embedding inflexible systems that inhibit change.
8. Governance of the processes of dissemination of scientific knowledge should be accountable to or in the hands of the scientific community.

The Council (2023) scrutinized the current operation of scientific publishing to assess the extent to which these principles are reflected in practice. It concluded that the dominant commercial sector of science publishing does not perform well in upholding these principles:

1. Excessive pricing places much of the record of science beyond the reach of many in poorly funded institutions or administrations, either as readers or authors.
2. Companies’ appropriation of copyright denies the cost-free reuse of scientific publications in many scientific applications, while permitting companies to sell on access to their holdings of papers without reference to authors.
3. Peer review is crumbling as companies inflate paper production and under-utilize automated and AI systems that could identify error.
4. There is widespread failure to require evidential data to be made accessible, or to check that data does indeed support a truth claim.
5. Modern technologies would allow a source-agnostic system that would allow scientists to efficiently know of and access all published material in their area of interest. The fundamental business model of commercial companies denies this.
6. Bibliodiversity (and linguistic diversity) between disciplines is increasingly able to be accommodated to permit interoperation. Current systems tend to be proprietary and inflexible.
7. Software should be open source and systems need to be accessible to new entrants and those with a low level of infrastructure provision. The journal, though central to the commercial business model, is an anachronism for most scientific purposes. It should be dispensed with, except where the discursive journal function is maintained.
8. Access to scientific knowledge and assessments is increasingly monopolized by major commercial providers and is monetized to the benefit of their shareholders. Governance for editorial standards and adherence to the above principles should be exercised by the scientific community, universities and funders in particular, and not by commercial entities. Only publications that meet these standards should be acceptable in assessments of the work of researchers.

Without reform, the publication process will remain inefficient, and a new era of open science will go unrealized. The nub of the problem lies in the interaction between researchers and publishers. Bibliometric indices such as citations are used by universities as means of evaluating the scientific contribution of individuals and of the university itself in so-called rankings, and publishers are keen to provide publishing opportunities to facilitate these outcomes. The consequence has been an explosion in the number of publication outlets and published papers (Hanson et al., 2024) at a time when there does not appear to have been any increase in scientific creativity (Park et al., 2023). Consequently, although paper productivity has been increasing, scientific productivity has been decreasing, with a transfer of effort into paper writing from teaching and other academic tasks. Moreover, so powerful has been the incentive to produce papers, that journal providers offer fraudulent scientific output to academics on a massive scale (Sabel & Seifert, 2021).

It could be argued that publishers are merely the passive conduits for fraudulent science, or that the explosion of over-publication is driven by researchers. But it is commercial interests that create much of the fraudulent material, and companies that promote special issues and other vehicles for over-publication. As recognized as early as 1988, “these publishers are not really in the business of education; their business is making money.” They “are in the information conduit for historical and anachronistic reasons; there is no technical or economic reason why they must remain a part of it” (Thompson, 1988). When seeking causes in legal settings, the Latin axiom cui bono?—who stands to gain?—is a valuable guide to motive. In financial terms, the commercial publishers gain greatly. Researchers, whether as producers, reviewers or editors, gain nothing. As indicated above, commercial publishers fail to deliver what science needs, which underlines why the issue of governance (Principle 8) is vital for the future of publishing.

There are, however, two other great contemporary challenges to science that are profoundly relevant to publishing, in the sense of making science a public concern, which even reform as indicated above, though necessary, does not address. Firstly, the landscape of communication has changed. Digital technologies have enabled revolutionary developments that have changed the dynamics of public discourse. At its inception, the expectation was that the internet would enable a “global village square” (Berners-Lee, 2000) that would enliven an interconnected global community in an interactive public space enabled by technology. Instead, the outcome has been tribalism. The algorithms used by social media platforms have reinforced existing preoccupations in ways that discourage restraint and create self-insulating bubbles of certainty that undermine societal dialogue (Watson et al., 2024). The open, democratic landscape of communication has been crumbling before our eyes because of conspiracy theories and of mis- and dis-information (Hayes, 2025). The latest Global Risk Report of the World Economic Forum (2025) identifies undermining social cohesion and deepening political divides among the most severe of contemporary risks.

Secondly, the re-emergence of nationalist, populist political projects has progressively undermined the rules-based international system within the frame of the United Nations that recognizes the vital necessity of international collaboration in facing global challenges. “Illiberal democracies” prioritize an exclusive definition of the values of the state while retaining democratic forms, such as elections, but dispensing with the liberal values that underpin independent institutions and independent thought. They replace the powerful uncertainties of science with the perverse certainties of autocracies. They are intolerant of diversity of thought. They are uneasy with Jefferson’s (1789/n.d.) comment, that “whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

Each of these outcomes reinforces the other, as autocracies seize on disinformation and bubbles of disinformation benefit from autocratic underwriting. Science suits neither. As Selwyn Duke has commented, “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” The US government has recently threatened that the biomedical scientists that it funds must publish in government-sponsored journals rather than in independent journals that have scientific review processes as set out in the second paragraph above, presumably due to fear that these might reject hypotheses preferred by the government.

As a consequence of these developments, not only is the current publishing process in need of reform, but scientists need to re-evaluate their targets for publication and the nature of publication. Hitherto, scientists have written for other scientists and have been rewarded by the extent to which they succeed through citations. A new era of open science must make openness to society, to citizens, an important part of its mission (Boulton, 2021). In practice, this will require scientists to couch at least some of their arguments in accessible prose rather than the arcane jargon that is the norm in many disciplines. It will also require universities to provide the structures, initiatives, and incentives for the public engagement necessary to make science a public enterprise of the kind envisaged by Nehru.

Acknowledgement of creative discussions with members of the ISC Steering Group on Scientific Publishing: Abrizah Abdullah (Malaysia), Subbiah Arunachalam, Moumita Koley, and Megha Sud (India), Dominique Babini (Argentina), Michael Barber (Australia), Ahmed Bawa (South Africa), Amy Brand and Heather Joseph (USA), Luke Drury (Ireland), Robert Gatti and Lizzie Sayer (UK), Joy Owango (Kenya), Wang Qi and Wang Qinglin (China).

References

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