Scholarly Publishing Won’t Be Saved by Incremental Change

Library and scholarly communities have expressed mixed reactions to so-called “transformative agreements” between academic institutions and publishers (see Šimukovič, Legge, and Dér). These agreements shift subscription contract terms to incorporate open access publishing by authors from signatory institutions. But they offer only incremental change to the field of scholarly publishing, failing to address the built-in systemic inequities in global access to knowledge.

This is characteristic of a wicked problem, a concept developed by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber (1973) to describe the difficulties of developing and refining social policy. They write that social policy problems, including those related to the public good, are inherently different from a scientific or engineering problem, such as solving an equation or analyzing the structure of an unknown compound. Scientific problems are “definable and separable and may have solutions that are findable.” Wicked problems, on the other hand, are “ill-defined” and “never solved; at best they are only re-solved—over and over again” (p. 160).

This is an apt description of scholarly publishing, where the many business models, access mechanisms, and new agreements proposed as solutions to the problem of access to knowledge merely create new problems or reinforce old ones—over and over again.

So, how did we get here? And how can we find our way out?

The Evolution of Library-Publisher Agreements

From the perspective of academic libraries, the history of library-publisher agreements has been marked by a series of rebranding efforts—from “offset agreements” to “read and publish” and “transformative agreements”—with minimal substantive change. From the Big Deal bundles of the early 2000s to today’s transformative agreements, money exchanges have shifted into buckets with new labels, but the fundamental power dynamics remain constant.

As Frazier (2005) noted when criticizing Big Deals, these arrangements typically “limit the ability of the library to eliminate subscriptions or reduce expenditures.” This critique is equally applicable to today’s transformative agreements, which have been criticized for cementing for-profit motives in publishing and increasing library spending in terms of both currency and labor (Farley et al., 2021), as well as for only serving rich authors in rich countries (Legge, 2025). As Ghamandi (2020) observed, these agreements merely disguise “the large transfer of money to the oligopoly and the lack of fundamental change in academic culture, while foreclosing the opportunity for an actual publishing revolution” (pp. 1–2).

As ESAC noted in 2016, a “proper open access model” would require “fully omitting subscription costs or other access based cost components” (ESAC Initiative, 2016). Today’s transformative agreements fall far short of this objective, instead applying a veneer of change over a system built on unsustainability and inequity. Once they lose their initial luster, we see these “tarnished agreements” for what they are—the same old model being presented again and again.

Recent developments underscore this problem. In response to mandates for public access, such as the United States OSTP’s 2022 Nelson Memo and Plan S, publishers and libraries have tended to entrench existing systems rather than fundamentally reimagining scholarly communication. As Elena Šimukovič noted in Katina in 2024, authors, readers, and decision-makers find themselves trapped in systemic inertia. They face mounting pressure to sign transformative agreements and participate in a system shaped by its own profit motives, offering little long-term benefit to the very people it claims to serve.

Scholarly Publishing as a Wicked Problem

Claire Redhead characterized “the creation of a healthy and diverse open access market as a wicked problem: one whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point” (2021). We extend this assertion: scholarly publishing itself has always already been a wicked problem (to use a term derived from post-structuralism and deconstruction theory and popularized by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time). Because of the symbiotic relationship between academic institutions and the scholarly publishing industry, the context surrounding scholarly publishing both defines and limits what it must be, therefore constraining change to incremental steps that never result in substantive alteration. Specifically, we see transformative agreements as a symptom that embodies the wicked problem. Rittel and Webber’s (1973) ten characteristics of wicked problems offer a useful framework to analyze scholarly publishing, with transformative agreements as a focal point:

1. No definitive formulation: Stakeholders disagree on the fundamental problem—is it high costs, infrastructure, the presence of for-profit players, perverse incentives, or something else? Disagreement about the fundamental problem means proposed solutions are often at odds with one another, and in some circumstances are mutually exclusive—for example, treating knowledge as a public good vs. gatekeeping and monetizing it.
2. No stopping rule: The “transition” to open access is perpetual, as subscription or subscription-like models continue without clear goalposts or signs of success.
3. Solutions are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad: No one can say whether a new kind of publishing business model is the correct model. Many different parties disagree on whether models are “good” or “bad.” When a solution like “offset agreements” receives criticism, rather than being fundamentally changed, it is rebranded as a “transformative agreement” and finds success.
4. No way to test solutions: “Pilot projects” occur in real contexts with real money, making true testing impossible. As described by Rittel and Webber (1973), “The full consequences cannot be appraised until the waves of repercussions have completely run out, and we have no way of tracing all the waves through all the affected lives ahead of time or within a limited time span” (p. 163). Because scholarly publishing is endemic to many institutions’ identities and success measures, changes have deep and lasting effects that ripple across contexts.
5. Irreversible consequences: Money exchanged in transformative agreements isn’t refundable; these are legally binding contracts. Similar to Big Deals, transformative agreements lock institutions into expensive and sometimes unfavorable terms and are difficult to back out of.
6. Endless potential solutions: Open access business models have proliferated, as have different kinds of publishing activities that try to work around the scholarly journal or monograph (preprint, post-publication review, blogging, social media).
7. Each problem is unique: Academic publishing is frequently described as incomparable to other publishing or economic contexts. For example, authors rarely receive compensation for their work, and, especially in journal publishing, royalties are non-existent. Materials like journal articles are also often bought by institutions for their members, rather than being purchased by individuals. For this reason, solutions to problems from other contexts are discarded.
8. Every wicked problem is a symptom of other problems: Publishing issues can be framed as symptoms of consumerism and capitalist extraction. Incremental steps toward change, such as open access article processing charges, actually worsen the tangle of issues because they further entrench larger problems such as global publishing inequities.
9. Problem description determines solutions: An individual’s positionality determines both how they describe the issue as well as the potential solutions they perceive to be available. For well-resourced institutions that have always paid for subscriptions, article processing charges and other commercial interventions may seem to be the “obvious” answer.
10. High stakes for all involved: Solutions affect public funds, library budgets, jobs, institutional identities, and individual authors’ careers. Because of the highly embedded nature of scholarly publishing and academia, any proposed solution or change to an established practice can have ripple effects. Entire editorial boards have resigned over changes to publishers’ open access policies, potentially impacting not only their own careers but also the interests of authors in that journal, past and future.

A Moribund Ecosystem

In nature, when an ecosystem is dying but still hanging on with a few residents, it’s often called moribund (Pal & Paul, 2020). The wicked problem of scholarly publishing traps authors in a system that exhibits similar characteristics—it’s in decline due to financial pressures, complex and restricted systems of access, collapsing peer review, perverse incentive structures, as well as a lack of meaningful change and adaptation. With internet connectivity and networked scholars, the scholarly ecosystem no longer needs traditional commercial publishing channels, yet the model persists like a maladaptive trait that inhibits the ability of the academic population to adapt to this environment. Libraries and publishers constantly seek change but settle for only incremental adjustments. Without addressing the fundamental nature of the wicked problem, all proposed solutions only feed back into the wicked problem.

Others have described this problem using different terms: Burgess (2021) characterizes academic libraries as being in a “second nature” state, where the values of profits, capitalist gains, and budgetary considerations have subsumed “first nature” drives of long-term viability. After all value has been extracted and people depart the ecosystem altogether, this second nature state results in ruin and collapse.

In scholarly publishing, this could look like researchers circumventing paywalls and sharing their scholarly work in other publishing ecosystems, or even leaving academia altogether to pursue their careers in fields that do not depend on the scholarly publishing ecosystem to identify “success.” If we come to a point when there is no one left to read the scholarly journal, why would anyone publish in it, and why would a library buy it?

To stave off departure and collapse, participants in the scholarly publishing ecosystem have engaged in a strategy of incrementalism to suggest modernization and response to changing needs and realities. Instead, this incrementalism has created the stagnation characteristic of the moribund ecosystem we see before us today.

Current trends confirm this analysis. Libraries have been canceling and re-negotiating Big Deals, citing reasons like increasing costs and reduced budgets, but also signaling interest in pursuing open access agreements (Maranville and Diaz, 2021; McLean, Dawson, and Sorensen, 2021). Yet, the 2023 decision by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) to propose alternatives to transformative agreements reflects growing recognition that re-negotiations toward transformative agreements actually do very little to move the needle toward long-term viability, instead prioritizing incrementalism and retaining the familiar power structure in which publishers guide the future of scholarly publishing. The behaviors of those acting within the moribund ecosystem prevent its evolution, and, by extension, impede any solution to the wicked problem.

Some corporate publishers have already sensed the lack of long-term viability of the scholarly publishing ecosystem and have begun shifting away from the moribund ecosystem to a new ecosystem, the business of data analytics, ripe with new opportunities for profit from data harvesting.

Resistance and Refusal

We see one way to solve the wicked problem and escape the moribund ecosystem: deliberate acts of resistance and refusal by academic researchers and faculty. As McGranahan (2016) wrote, “Refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way.” Instead of perpetuating the status quo through incrementalism, libraries and scholars must, as Malavika Legge encouraged in Katina, ask the questions that allow them to escape the well-traveled, familiar path.

Popowich (2021) asks: “What does it mean to refuse to go along with the status quo of scholarly publishing?” (p. 2). We want to add: what will spur refusal? Will it be necessity, or intention?

Individual users have already begun adapting to and resisting the wicked problem of scholarly publishing by, for example, circumventing paywalls using Sci-Hub, posting preprints and PDFs despite publisher restrictions, and using AI to replace academic labor in an austerity environment.

Organizations like ScholarLed, a consortium of open access book publishers, seeks ways to “scale small” rather than engage in the constant growth expected in the publishing industry. Conceived out of concern for the “lack of digital transition from the region’s journals,” Redalyc indexes and preserves diamond OA, academic-owned journals from around the world.

Initiatives such as these embody refusal out of both necessity and adherence to the values of open science.

For academics trapped in the moribund ecosystem of scholarly publishing and its various “transformative” models, which will come first—the collapse and ruin of decrepit budget models, or a collective refusal and commitment to build a system of our own?

References

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