Ten years of a ‘quiet culture war’: where does it stand now?

In 2014, I wrote ‘A quiet culture war in research libraries – and what it means for librarians, researchers and publishers’, arguing that there existed an ongoing conflict within the academic library profession over whether the library’s most important role is to support its local institution or to advance global priorities (specifically, progress towards open scholarship). Here I reassess the landscape ten years later, finding that this conflict has both persisted and deepened, and offer two predictions: first, that the broader systemic conflict between competing business models will not be resolved by libraries, authors or publishers, but rather by institutions and funders, and second, that the end result will be a system characterized by coexisting models of pay‑access and open‑access publishing.

Ten years ago, I wrote an article in these pages titled ‘A quiet culture war in research libraries – and what it means for librarians, researchers and publishers’ (Anderson, 2015). In that article, I put forward the argument that there was growing conflict within the academic library profession between, on the one hand, those who see ‘the research library’s most fundamental and important mission as serving the scholarly needs of its institution’s students, scholars and researchers’, and, on the other, those for whom ‘the research library’s most fundamental and important mission (is) changing the world of scholarly communication for the better’. I argued, further, that while ‘these two areas of endeavor are not mutually exclusive, they are in competition for scarce resources’ and therefore at least somewhat in tension with each other, and that ‘how this conflict plays out over the next few years may have significant implications for the scholars who depend on libraries for access to research content and for the publishers and other vendors for whom libraries are a core customer base’.

I have now been asked to assess where things stand in this regard, ten years on. And as I scan the landscape, what I see is quite interesting.

First of all, though, looking back at the ‘quiet culture war’ article, I may not have been clear enough about why I believed there was actually a ‘culture war’ going on, as opposed to a mere diversity of coexisting views. Before starting on an assessment of where we are now, I would like to clarify those points.

What is a culture war, and what is it not? Unfortunately, it is not a term with a settled formal definition. Although the English phrase is a calque of the German Kulturkampf (which referred specifically to a seven‑year ‘culture struggle’ that took place between church and state in the nineteenth‑century Kingdom of Prussia), the term’s meaning in English is quite a bit broader. The Wikipedia entry (Culture war, 2025) for culture war offers the following definition: ‘A culture war is a form of cultural conflict … between different groups who struggle to impose their own ideology (moral beliefs, humane virtues and religious practices) upon mainstream society, or upon the other.’ When I refer to a culture war in academic libraries, I am using the term in that broader sense: I see ongoing conflict in the academic library profession between those who see the library’s fundamental duty as serving its host institution (providing service to the global community on a secondary basis), and those who see its fundamental duty as serving the global community, in particular by advancing an agenda of global open access to scholarly content.

This conflict is in some senses inevitable, and in other ways less so. It is unavoidable to the degree that local and global initiatives compete for limited resources. (For example, each dollar spent on buying institutional access to one publisher’s subscription‑access journal is a dollar not available to spend in support of another publisher’s subscribe‑to‑open [S2O] scheme.) But it is also true that all libraries engage in both local and global endeavors, and that there is no reason why different views on the best mix of local‑global orientation cannot coexist among library professionals. However, to be clear: I am positing more than just the coexistence of diverse perspectives on this issue. It seems to me that there is actual and ongoing conflict between those perspectives, primarily taking the form of globalist pressure being exerted on more institutionally‑oriented librarians and their universities. Such pressure manifests itself primarily in two ways: first, criticizing librarians for building collections specifically for local, institutional use (Fister, 2008, 2013), and second, pressure on librarians from both colleagues and publishers in the open access (OA) advocacy community to shift institutional resources away from purchasing access and towards the direct financial support of OA publishing projects (Engeszer & Sarli, 2014; SPARC, 2021a).

It is important to note how rare it is to hear voices of resistance to this majoritarian view within the research library community. My own interventions have been among the very, very few such opinions being raised, at least publicly. This may be because the opinion I advance here is very much a minority one; it is also possible that these concerns are more broadly held by people who dare not raise their heads above the parapet to speak it. I suspect the latter, given the number of library colleagues who continue to contact me privately to praise my ‘bravery’ in saying things that they themselves believe but would never dare to say publicly. (The fact that so many of these commenters thank me for being a ‘voice of sanity’ is particularly concerning; it does not suggest broad optimism within librarianship about the current state of our professional discourse.) But I hasten to acknowledge that as someone who has held tenured positions for about 20 years now, I actually risk relatively little by advancing an unpopular view. For others earlier in their careers, or who find themselves in jobs where they are subordinate to librarians with very strong views in favor of a more global orientation, the risk entailed in speaking their minds may be much greater, and I cannot criticize them for staying quiet.

In this update, I will make three fundamental arguments:

  1. The conflict I described as a culture war in 2014 has not only persisted, but become more entrenched over the course of the ensuing decade.
  2. The larger systemic conflict of which the library culture war is a symptom will most likely end up being resolved not by librarians, authors or publishers, but rather by a combination of research institutions and funding agencies, because these control the resources that sustain all activity in the scholarly communication ecosystem.
  3. The ultimate result will be neither a decisive predominance of pay‑access nor of OA publishing, but a blend of the two that favors OA while preserving a substantial place for pay‑access.

My focus here will be on scholarly journal publishing, recognizing that the economics and the academic/professional dynamics of the scholarly book publishing ecosystem are different in significant ways and would require a separate analysis.

The conflict has deepened

The OA movement has always been characterized by a totalizing tendency. The language of the foundational statements of the movement, including the Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda statements, makes clear that those who crafted and advanced those statements were interested not merely in offering new publishing options, but rather in eradicating pay‑access models on a global level and replacing them with OA ones. The vision is that, in the words of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)’s public declaration, the ‘peer‑reviewed journal literature’ should be:

(freely available) on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2006).

This vision has remained more or less constant, as defining statements of influential advocacy groups like SPARC (SPARC, 2021b) and cOAlition S (Plan S, n.d.a) and the policies of powerful funding agencies like the Gates Foundation (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2025) and Wellcome (Wellcome, 2025) make clear. A notable exception to the anti‑subscription stance was that of the pioneering OA advocate Stevan Harnad, whose position was always that there was no reason for subscription journals to go away, as long as authors were permitted to self‑archive the accepted manuscripts of their articles and make them freely available to the public (a model generally characterized as ‘green’ OA), either with or without embargoes (Harnad, 2015). Libraries saw an early opportunity in the Harnadian position, establishing library‑based institutional repositories for the open distribution of locally‑produced scholarship – but without general or sustained success, as the percentage of published articles archived in open repositories, low to begin with, actually decreased by 27% over the ten‑year period 2013‑2023 (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, 2025).

Meanwhile, in the United States, attempts to impose institutional open‑access mandates have uniformly failed, resulting instead in a proliferation of institutional policies or statements that proclaim support for OA in principle but invariably allow faculty authors to opt out of participation at their discretion (Anderson, 2016). As time went on and the green model failed to achieve a critical level of real‑world uptake, Harnad eventually retired the field in frustration (Lewandowski, n.d.). Here it is important to note that discipline‑specific servers like arXiv (which had begun and flourished as a platform for sharing rough manuscripts in the high‑energy physics field ten years prior to BOAI), and its various discipline‑based successors, have achieved more success, but none has displaced the traditional subscription‑based journals in its field – nor were they generally intended to do so (PsyArXiv Blog, n.d.).

The conundrum of totalism

The totalizing position puts the advocate or activist in a complicated spot. On the one hand, eradication is a binary goal; 99% reduction represents significant progress, but not success. On the other hand, for those who wish to make a living advocating for eradication, this challenge also acts as job security: as early progress towards the goal eventually slows and becomes more difficult, calls for support can become more urgent. When your job is to advocate for an impossible goal, your job is likely to be quite secure (unless and until those who pay your salary lose confidence in the likelihood of the project’s success, of course).

For those who wish to see a global transition to OA publishing, the difficulty of the current situation is compounded further by the fact that while many funding models for supporting OA have emerged over the past two decades, only one has proven itself sustainable at scale: it is the article processing charge (APC), whereby instead of charging readers for access to content, publishers charge authors for access to publishing services. This approach has, unsurprisingly, proven quite popular with publishers – both new OA publishers and legacy firms that entered the business long ago as subscription publishers – and that model has seen both explosive and sustained growth over the past decade (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, 2025).

The problem, of course, is that if one’s goal as an OA advocate is to eliminate barriers to access, the APC model is not particularly attractive: it is just as much a pay‑access model as the subscription is. The APC model simply takes what was once a toll‑gate separating the reader (many of whom are also authors) from access to content and turns it into a toll‑gate separating authors (all of whom are also readers) from access to editorial services, certification and formal distribution. APCs also create a dangerous conflict of interest for the publisher, in that the publisher’s interest in maintaining a robust revenue stream comes into conflict with its interest in declining to publish bad scholarship. This conflict of interest is inherent and inescapable in the context of APC‑funded publishing. This is not to say that it cannot be managed honestly and ethically; in fact, hundreds of publishers do manage it well and successfully maintain the integrity of their publishing programs while charging APCs. However, this model does create tremendous opportunities for abuse, which (sadly if predictably) have been enthusiastically embraced by tens of thousands of ‘predatory’ journals (i.e. journals that falsely claim to impose serious editorial standards while in fact publishing whatever is submitted, whether it be solid scholarship or nonsense, as long as the submission is accompanied by an APC payment) (Freedman & Kurambayev, 2024). The emergence of predatory publishing has managed to tarnish the reputation of OA publishing to such a degree that some authors now shy away from all APC‑based publishing opportunities in the mistaken belief that all such publishing programs are predatory in nature.

As time has gone on the OA movement has achieved very significant market growth, but has failed to dislodge pay‑access publishing – which not only maintains its position as the dominant mode of journal publishing on an article basis, but also accounts for a growing number of articles per annum even as (APC‑funded) OA articles have increased their market share (The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, 2025). In response, the research library community has taken two very different and contradictory positions: on the one hand, doubling down on ‘global transition’ rhetoric, advancing within the profession a totalizing position that casts OA as both the only morally acceptable mode of publishing and an inevitably global and universal one (The inevitability of open access, 2012); on the other hand, adopting what have come to be called ‘transformative agreements’ – deals struck with subscription publishers whereby libraries pay a flat annual fee that provides institution‑wide access to content as well as covering the APCs (at least to some degree) for institutional authors (Hinchliffe, 2019). Such deals have the simultaneous effect of making OA publishing more easily available within the ‘walled gardens’ of these libraries’ host institutions and of continuing to support the subscription business model. To be clear, this is not to say that transformative agreements are a bad thing; it is only to point out that they are no path to a global OA transition – and that it remains unclear in what exact sense advocates expect them to be transformative.

The struggle continues (and becomes more complicated)

What all of this suggests is that the conflict I described ten years ago within the research library community has not gone away – it has only deepened and become more complex. Libraries remain stuck between the desire to make all scholarly content freely available to the world and the need to provide real and direct benefit to the institutions whose money they are spending; some libraries have embraced (with varying degrees of reluctance) transformative agreements, while other libraries and OA advocates criticize them for propping up legacy publishing systems (Farley et al., 2021); within the library community there is a dominant culture of support for a global transition to OA (with all of the ‘great day’ rhetoric that such positions foster), while many who question the desirability of such a transition keep silent in order to avoid conflict with their colleagues. Baked into this conflict is the more fundamental one about which I wrote in my earlier article: those whose primary focus is support for their institutional hosts are more willing to continue paying for access to content and less willing to redirect collections money towards APCs or the direct support of OA publishing programs, while others who are most dedicated to the ideal of a universal OA transition see (and publicly criticize) such a stance as undermining progress towards a righteous global cause.

Furthermore, this conflict is not only between those with a local and those with a global focus, but also between those who have conflicting views about the likelihood that a system‑wide transition to OA publishing will bring a net benefit to the world. While the global benefits of making high‑quality scholarship freely available to all are intuitively obvious, calculating net benefit requires looking not only at benefits but also at costs – including opportunity cost. Not everyone, even in libraries, sees OA as a mode of publishing that always and inevitably provides more net global benefit than pay‑access publishing does. As previously noted, those who do not subscribe to the goal of a global transition to OA are put in a position of conflict with their colleagues for whom OA is a moral imperative. I see no real prospect for resolution to these conflicts in the foreseeable future.

The systemic conflict will not be resolved by libraries or authors

The conflict I have described within the library community is a subset of a larger conflict that has been ongoing within the scholarly communication ecosystem for roughly 25 years. To say that it will not be resolved in the foreseeable future is not, of course, to say that the scholarly publishing ecosystem will not eventually reach a state of equilibrium. It is only to say that librarians are not likely to be the agents of that resolution. While it is true that we have stewardship over the budgets that largely underwrite scholarly publishing, those budgets are not ours to do with entirely as we see fit. Research libraries’ collections budgets are institutional funds vouchsafed to them for specific purposes by their host institutions, and (as I have argued at length elsewhere [Anderson, 2025] and do not need to belabor here) unilaterally redirecting those budgets to other purposes is both strategically unwise and ethically questionable.

Furthermore, while there have been many examples of libraries taking on publishing projects in an attempt to change the course of scholarly publishing, and while those projects have had varying degrees of success, none of them appears likely to catalyze systemic change – largely, I think, because the challenges of scale and sustainability are so daunting. A fair number of library‑based publishing projects have demonstrated conclusively that innovative open publishing models are possible at a limited scale or for a limited time; none has yet led to anything that looks like systemic change in the structure of scholarly publishing. Such a transition could indeed happen at some point in the future; however, the OA movement is now a quarter of a century old, and so far the only funding model it has produced that clearly demonstrates both scalability and sustainability is not a library‑based model but another publisher‑based, toll‑access one: the APC.

It would be tempting to think that scholarly authors have a much greater degree of control over the future of scholarly publishing than librarians do, since the work that authors produce is the lifeblood of the ecosystem; a journal to which no author wishes to submit is a journal that cannot survive. But authors are unlikely to drive a radical shift to OA because authors do not, for the most part, submit to journals because they are enthusiastic about the journals’ business models. They select journals based on the degree to which publishing in those journals will help them achieve their scholarly and professional goals. To this point: one of the ubiquitous early talking points of the OA movement was that authors were sure to embrace OA because, after all, authors ‘write in order to be read’ – and therefore, of course, they will naturally want to reach as many readers as possible (Prosser, 2004). But this was always a fundamentally flawed argument. It assumes that wanting to be read necessarily means wanting to be read by as many people as possible, whereas in fact, for most scholarly authors, what matters most is being read (and, importantly, cited) by one’s disciplinary peers and colleagues. The prospect of one’s work being available to everyone in the world may not be unattractive, but does not generally represent enough added value to motivate a change in publishing behavior – particularly when the change being urged would require publishing in journals that are not core to the author’s field. (As most library repository managers can sadly attest, the desire to reach a global audience is not even sufficient to motivate most scholarly authors to place copies of already‑published articles in institutional repositories.)

Who has the power to compel change?

Some years hence, when the dust has settled and we can clearly discern a new and relatively stable configuration of scholarly publishing, I believe we will see that its contours were shaped neither by libraries nor by authors, but rather – for better or worse – by legacy publishers, funders and governments. Legacy publishers do not, for the most part, have the luxury of utopian ideology; while advocates who enjoy secure university salaries rhapsodize about the great day of a global OA transition, legacy publishers (both commercial and nonprofit) are trying to figure out how to stay in business, and tend to do whatever will work financially while also keeping them aligned with their missions and/or their stakeholders. This, in part, explains the substantial movement of established publishers to APC‑funded OA models. For all of its many weaknesses, the APC model is fiscally sustainable because it scales so very well: each additional article published brings in more revenue. It may be a deeply unattractive approach for those who wish to break down barriers to access, but it is just as deeply attractive to publishers who wish to continue publishing.

Those who do have real power to push the behavior of scholarly authors in an OA direction are, first, those who fund their research, and, second, those who can bring the power of the institution or the state to bear on them. Often – especially in Europe and the United Kingdom, but to a significant degree in the United States as well – these entities are one and the same. Funders are in a position to say, ‘You will not get further grants from us in future unless you publish the results of your currently funded research on an open basis.’ Governments that sponsor and ultimately control employment at research institutions can say, ‘As long as you are on the faculty of our universities, you will publish your work openly.’ Not only are funders and government oversight agencies in a position to compel such publishing behavior, but their decision‑makers are also nicely insulated from the practical consequences of these mandates: they control the funding and set the rules, and it is up to those who depend on the funding and are subject to the rules to figure out how to make the requirements work. One example of this dynamic is the establishment of cOAlition S in Europe, which unites government funding agencies in that global region in a program of mandated OA, known as Plan S (Plan S, n.d.b). To the Coalition’s chagrin (but to no one else’s surprise), this initiative simply added energy to the proliferation of APC‑funded and hybrid journals, a development against which cOAlition S has mounted a flailing and largely ineffectual rearguard action (Plan S, n.d.c), with the result that its implementation directives are now a hopeless dog’s breakfast of confusing principles, requirements, guidelines and statements (Coalition S, n.d.).

In the US and the UK, some major public and private funding agencies have enacted similarly strict openness requirements, though generally with less micromanagement of publishing options than what cOAlition S attempted and with broader and more liberal definitions of OA. In the US, what have been most notable are the requirements imposed by the Gates Foundation and the guidance issued to all federal funding agencies by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) (Nelson, 2022). However, it is not at all clear that the OSTP guidance put forward by the Obama and (in a stricter and more prescriptive version) Biden administrations will survive the depredations of the Trump administration and its mania for radical cuts to government regulation and bureaucracy. (Indeed, the most recent public‑access guidance, issued in 2022 by the Biden White House, was taken down from the White House website in January 2025 and is, as of writing this, still unavailable except in copies archived elsewhere.)

So while the real power to enact global change rests, in my view, with governments and private funders, it is not at all clear how much appetite these have for creating a global transition to open scholarly publishing. That appetite will certainly prove to be, at best, uneven across polities.

The ultimate result will not be a global transition, but a new hybridity

Space does not permit a full analysis of all the elements of global economics and scholarly dynamics that I believe will, collectively, prevent a universal transition either to or away from OA. Not addressed here, for example, are the economic factors that make pay‑access in many ways more affordable for scholars and institutions in developing countries than any fiscally sustainable OA models would be; nor are the very different economic and disciplinary dynamics that make various publishing models of widely differing feasibility in the humanities, fine arts, social sciences and applied sciences. But the factors discussed in the sections above are, I believe, more than sufficient to support a prediction that the scholarly communication ecosystem will eventually arrive at an equilibrium state that strikes a balance – however uneasy – between different publishing models that work well, in varying degrees, for the full diversity of that ecosystem’s participants and stakeholders. APC‑based models will never work well for researchers who are not funded primarily by grants; subscription models are demonstrably exclusionary to researchers and students at poorly‑funded institutions; ‘diamond’ OA (a model whereby the costs of publishing are covered by either institutional subvention or third‑party contributions, of which S2O is a subset) does a good job of eliminating access inequities but does not appear sustainable at system‑wide scale; and so forth.

The fundamental error of the OA movement, from the beginning, has been the wishful belief that as long as a publishing model is desirable and equitable, it must therefore be both attainable and sustainable. This error was compounded by an arrogant belief that OA is the only morally acceptable mode of scholarly publishing, and that therefore any resistance to or questioning of it must arise from either ignorance or bad faith. The culture war that continues in the research library world arises from and is sustained by the fact that many librarians want something they are not positioned to bring into existence by their own will, and that not all librarians agree is even desirable, let alone attainable. And a general tendency among librarians to valorize the global and collective at the expense of the local and specific has only become more pronounced, as frustration mounts over the increasingly clear reality that the most scalable and fiscally sustainable OA business models are no more equitable than the old pay‑access models were.

Nevertheless, this culture war remains relatively quiet, in significant part because one viewpoint is so dominant within the culture of libraries that speaking out with skepticism is highly risky. But the ultimate resolution of this culture war within libraries will, I believe, have relatively little bearing on the ultimate shape of scholarly communication.

References

Abbreviations and Acronyms

A list of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this and other Insights articles can be accessed here – click on the following URL and then select the ‘full list of industry A&As’ link: http://www.uksg.org/publications#aa.

Competing interests – The author has declared no competing interests.

First publication. 2026. DOI: 10.1629/uksg.712 Published on Jan 13, 2026. CC Attribution 4.0

LinkedIn
Posted in: Education, Libraries & Librarians, Open Source
➤