Who owns knowledge? It sounds like an abstract philosophical question, but it has a very concrete price tag. The global academic publishing industry generates roughly US$19 billion a year, with profit margins approaching 40%. Much of that money comes from research that was already paid for once: often publicly funded, then written, reviewed, and edited for free by researchers. Universities and their libraries still pay to read the results, often at a steep markup.
In the last month, GCAS pushed back against that arrangement in two ways.
First, we launched the Open Commons: a curated library of open-access scholarship across philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and politics. Everything on it is free to read, no login required.
Second, GCAS students now have access to JSTOR, one of the largest digital libraries of academic journals, books, and primary sources in the humanities and social sciences. No GCAS student should have their research disrupted because a paper sits behind a paywall.
Why academic publishing is so expensive
We’re not the only ones thinking about this. A recent article in The Conversation, “Décapitaliser le savoir scientifique et le rendre accessible à tous : des solutions existent,” by Frédéric Schmidt (Université Paris-Saclay), Camille Thomas (University of Bern), and Romain Vaucher (James Cook University), spells out how we got here. A small group of commercial publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE — control access to research the public already paid for. Elsevier’s parent company RELX reported over £1 billion in profit from its scientific publishing arm last year alone. A single article can cost dozens of euros to buy. Institutional subscriptions run into the millions; even Harvard’s library, the largest academic library in the United States, has warned it cannot keep pace with the prices.
The authors are honest about where the usual fixes fall short. Gold open access makes articles free to read but charges authors thousands of euros to publish (fees that nearly tripled across the major publishers in just five years). Green open access lets researchers deposit manuscripts in open repositories, but leaves the commercial system intact underneath it. Their preferred answer is diamond open access: free to publish, free to read, run by scientific communities, university libraries, and nonprofit associations rather than shareholders. The authors point to an example where the model already works: Peer Community In, which runs 21 thematic journals this way, the Open Journal Systems platform now used in 148 countries, and two diamond-access journals, Sedimentologika and Planetary Research, that they helped found themselves. Knowledge, in that model, stays what it was always supposed to be: a public good.
What is our response
The GCAS Open Commons was built as a starting point: a set of resources chosen because they’re well-regarded in their fields, curated by people who know the subject matter, rather than pulled from an unfiltered search.
It sits alongside something GCAS has been doing for years: مراجعة GCAS, our own peer-reviewed journal, has always been open access.
Additionally, JSTOR is now free for our own students, a recognition that until diamond open access becomes the norm, real research still means unlocking archives that haven’t caught up yet. This matters more than it might seem: around two-thirds of scholarly literature remains paywalled. When access depends on wealth, inequality gets built into the act of learning itself: data shows that researchers in the Global South are often disproportionately locked out of those archives, cite paywalled work less and pay for it in narrower scholarship.
At a moment when authoritarian politics keep gaining ground, public trust in scholarship depends on the public actually being able to reach it. GCAS was built on the opposite idea: that advanced study in philosophy, theology, and politics should not be gated by geography or wealth. Knowledge is not a commodity to be locked, but a commons to be shared.
If that’s a conversation you want to be part of, take a look through the Open Commons, explore our programmes, and come think with us.
Sources
- Schmidt, F., Thomas, C., & Vaucher, R. (2026, July 1). Décapitaliser le savoir scientifique et le rendre accessible à tous : des solutions existent. The Conversation France. https://theconversation.com/decapitaliser-le-savoir-scientifique-et-le-rendre-accessible-a-tous-des-solutions-existent-283930
- The Global Centre for Advanced Studies. Open Commons. https://gcas.ie/open-commons/
- RELX Annual Report 2025: Market segments. https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/reports/annual-reports/2025-ar-sections/relx-2025-market-segments.pdf
- The Harvard Crimson (2025, October 30). Academic Publishing Keeps Getting More Expensive. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/10/30/harvard-open-access-funding/
- INASP (2019). Access to research in the Global South: Reviewing the evidence. https://www.inasp.info/sites/default/files/2019-01/S%20Gwynn%20access%20paper.pdf
- Causal evidence of racial and institutional biases in accessing scientific literature (2025, preprint). https://arxiv.org/html/2509.08299v1
- San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). https://sfdora.org/