The Promise of Alternative Publishing Practices

This study was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, a group of national organisations from six European countries working to enable open science by supporting information infrastructure at an international level. The project had three goals: to discover how to support innovation in scholarly communication; to gain insights into the maturity and development of alternative publishing platforms; and to develop insights for stakeholders who wish to support or adopt these approaches.

The study consulted 29 participants from across Europe and North America through interviews and focus groups, including researchers, research funding organisations and platform representatives, complemented by a focused literature review and bibliometric analysis.

We found that the transformation towards alternative publishing platform is already underway, and the growing adoption of preprinting and open peer review demonstrates that change is possible. The challenge now is ensuring that innovation moves from margins to mainstream not by forcing impossible choices on researchers, but by creating coordinated conditions where rigour, transparency and career advancement align. This requires multiple stakeholders acting simultaneously: systems must enable new practices with minimal friction, disciplinary communities must normalise transparency as core values, and funders and institutions must align evaluation criteria with the behaviours they seek to support.