(11 Mar 2026) “The question of R&P agreements asks whether the ends justify the means. On one hand, R&P agreements and the APC model upon which they are based have significantly increased the overall market share of OA publications over the past 10 years, now up to around 50% of all journal articles published annually (although that trajectory has plateaued over the past several years). R&P agreements also provide a neat solution for federally funded authors who are worried about potential caps on the amount of grant dollars they can spend on APCs.
On the other hand, many smart folks have pointed out that, under the hood, R&P agreements with large publishers are still the same big deals with the same big deal problems. R&P agreements help sustain the APC model, which has essentially moved the cost barrier from readers to authors, naturally excluding authors from underfunded disciplines, from institutions without R&P agreements, and largely from the Global South. The APC model also incentivizes journals to publish more articles and generate more revenue, which causes additional stress on the peer review system and contributes to higher retraction rates. Hybrid OA journals provide publishers a “double dip” revenue stream by charging libraries for subscription access while also reaping APCs, without reducing journal subscription costs when articles are published OA. Publishers don’t seem keen to speed up the rate of transition from hybrid to gold (it would take 70 years to reach fully gold OA at the 2018-2022 journal flipping rate, per Jisc). And why would publicly-traded publishers change anything about their behavior when they’re enjoying tidy returns (to the tune of a 38% profit margin worth $1.5 billion annually, for instance)?”
Sam Winemiller shares more here.
