Introduction
Small publishers are vital to scholarly communication, particularly in Europe, where the continent is characterized by a broad linguistic diversity. The most recent bibliometric study of journal publishers in Europe found over 16,000 scholarly journals published by small and mid‑sized publishers, where 36% were publishing open access (OA) in 2022, and the share of non‑English journals was 43% (Laakso & Multas, 2023). Although there has certainly been continued momentum increasing the share of OA journals in the last few years, there is still a substantial share of European journals from small publishers that are not publishing OA.
This article presents the findings from our 2025 report investigating the challenges and opportunities small European publishers encounter in transitioning to OA (Wise et al., 2025). Commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, we built on a 2022 bibliometric landscape analysis (Stephen & Stahlschmidt, 2022) and incorporated interviews, focus groups and case studies from six countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK) to assess OA transition barriers for small publishers. The 2022 study identified 1,029 small publishers across six European countries and found that the majority operate on a ‘mixed’ model, publishing some content openly and some behind paywalls, rather than being fully open or closed. Their findings emphasized the need to actively support small publishers through the transition to OA, and that was the starting point for this study: to consult with small publishers and other stakeholders in Europe to establish the current circumstances that small publishers face in the context of publishing or considering publishing OA.
Background and context
We examined six European countries – Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK – whose OA policies have developed unevenly, creating a fragmented publishing landscape. Each of these countries has instituted some form of national OA mandate or funding body requirement, and several have developed national platforms or infrastructure initiatives to support OA publishing. The Netherlands and Finland have relatively mature frameworks for co‑ordinating OA transition at the institutional and funder level, while France has invested in national infrastructure through platforms such as OpenEdition.
However, the policy environment is inconsistent across countries, with mandates that differ in scope and in the extent to which they account for publisher size or discipline. EU‑level initiatives, including OPERAS and the European Diamond Capacity Hub, offer collaborative infrastructure and capacity‑sharing opportunities, but these are unevenly accessible, and there is no larger European framework that connects OA requirements or distributes support equitably. The effect of this inconsistency is a fractured policy landscape that supports OA in principle but often fails to address the unique position of smaller publishing organizations.
Within this fractured policy landscape, a substantial but under‑supported sector of small academic publishers operates. The 2022 bibliometric landscape analysis commissioned by Knowledge Exchange identified at least 1,029 small publishers across the six countries, collectively producing a minimum of 1,696 journals, a figure that underscores the sector’s breadth even before accounting for book and monograph output (Stephen & Stahlschmidt, 2022). These publishers manage up to ten journals and publish fewer than 240 articles per year; while their output is smaller than commercial publishers, their contribution to their respective disciplines is disproportionately significant. Many small publishers produce multilingual or vernacular‑language content (Laakso & Multas, 2023), serving regional academic communities and preserving knowledge traditions that large commercial publishers have little incentive to support. These small publishers are central to what the scholarly communications community has come to call bibliodiversity.
Methodology
Our study was qualitative in design, building on the 2022 bibliometric landscape study to investigate the barriers and opportunities that small publishers encounter in transitioning to OA. Data was gathered through semi‑structured interviews, two focus groups and three short case studies, with findings from each phase informing the next.
Ten publishers were interviewed across Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK; France was not represented at the interview stage. The sample was intentionally varied in organizational type – including society publishers, commercial publishers, university presses and library presses – and in scale, ranging from single‑title operations to organizations managing several journals. Six of the ten publishers also operated small book programmes, which allowed the study to address OA transition in book publishing as well as journals. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed thematically, with themes developed iteratively across the dataset.
Two focus groups were organized to build on the interview findings and contextualize the themes identified. The first group included five publishers from the Netherlands and the UK, comprised of university, trade association and commercial publishers, and included the sciences, humanities and arts. This group explored publishers’ motivations for OA transition, the revenue models available to them and their perceptions of where support was most needed. The second focus group was designed to introduce a stakeholder perspective: seventeen organizations were represented, from each of the six countries and others, and including national policymakers, research funders, university and library leadership, publishing trade bodies, library consortia, national libraries and infrastructure providers. Participants in this group were invited to respond directly to the findings from the earlier phase of the study, which allowed our team to develop our analysis with the perspectives of those with strategic and operational responsibility for the wider publishing ecosystem.
Three short case studies were developed to establish specific institutional experiences: a commercial independent publisher, a large university press and a society‑owned journal. Each case study was selected to illuminate aspects of the OA transition in practice, and all three are referenced in the findings and discussion sections that follow.
This research did not require formal ethical approval, in line with standard practice for research of this type.
Findings
These small publishers are often working in the humanities and social sciences, disciplines with a distinct relationship to OA policy; much of the policy discourse around OA publishing has been shaped by STEM publishing norms, article processing charges and the portfolios of high‑volume journals and mainstream publishers. These policies do not reflect the publishing reality of small publishers.
Operationally, small publishers tend to retain author copyright as standard practice, and the majority function on a mixed‑access model, publishing some content openly and some behind paywalls, rather than operating as fully open or fully closed outlets. Publication schedules are typically quarterly or semi‑annual, reflecting lean editorial operations that often depend on voluntary labour, institutional subsidy or learned‑society support. These characteristics distinguish small publishers from large commercial ones; they are a structurally distinct category of publisher whose relationship to OA transition is not reflected in policies designed for STEM disciplines and large publishers.
Perceived benefits of open access
Despite the significant barriers they face in the transition to OA, small publishers across all six countries expressed genuine commitment to open access. Many publishers, particularly those operating within university or library structures, describe OA as an organizational commitment to ensuring that publicly funded research reaches the public that funds it, and to reducing the global inequities that subscription‑based publishing perpetuates. Society publishers and commercially oriented small publishers expressed similar values, alongside anxieties about the practical consequences of transition.
Publishers also identified the tangible benefits that OA models offer. Increased visibility was the most named benefit; publishers reported that openly available content attracted broader readership and greater citation reach, extending the influence of work that might otherwise circulate only within specialist subscription communities.
Several publishers shared that younger researchers were more likely to orient their submission decisions toward OA outlets, to expect open availability as the default and to view subscription publishing with a degree of scepticism that their senior colleagues did not share. Those publishers interpreted this pattern as reflecting a structural shift in the academic labour market that could reshape submission norms.
Publishers who had already transitioned to fully or predominantly OA models reported that they had experienced these benefits, even where the financial arrangements supporting OA remained precarious. Across interviews and focus groups, OA was consistently characterized as the inevitable direction of scholarly publishing, a view that informed approaches to OA transition.
Barriers and concerns
While most participants shared a belief in OA as the next frontier of scholarly publishing, they did not share confidence in the available routes to OA transition. Over the course of these conversations, many OA business models were discussed, but none were seen as straightforwardly viable or sustainable for small publishers, and the relative financial fragility of small publishers when compared with large commercial publishers was mentioned repeatedly.
Diamond OA, in which publishing costs are met through institutional, consortial or grant funding rather than through author or reader charges, was widely admired as the model most consistent with small publishers’ values. However, publishers expressed concerns about the sustainability of diamond OA in practice. Funding streams were characterized as short‑term, unpredictable and increasingly subject to competitive pressure as the number of publishers pursuing the same limited pool of grants increased.
Read and publish agreements were broadly seen as a model designed for large commercial publishers; the administrative demands, negotiating leverage and institutional relationships required to participate effectively in transformative agreements were not available to organizations managing a small number of journals with limited staff.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) was viewed by many as the most promising near‑term option, offering a transition mechanism that did not require upfront infrastructure investment or the abandonment of existing revenue relationships. However, publishers expressed widespread doubt about whether library commitment to S2O funding would hold over time, particularly as budgets tightened and the number of S2O publishers grew.
Across all models, available funding was characterized as poorly calibrated to the real costs and operational contexts of small publishers: administratively burdensome to apply for, short in duration and structured around assumptions drawn from larger organizations.
Relatedly, small publishers shared concerns about operational capacity; they frequently described organizations running on minimal staffing, with some managing their entire publishing operation through a single part‑time employee, often working alongside a voluntary editorial board drawn from the academic community. Within this context, the additional demands imposed by OA transition, such as monitoring policy developments, managing compliance with funder mandates, implementing new metadata standards, upgrading technical infrastructure and negotiating agreements are practically impossible to absorb without external support. There is a marked capacity gap between large and small publishers: large publishers have dedicated teams for compliance, infrastructure and policy engagement, while small publishers have none.
Concerns about prestige and perception emerged consistently across publisher types and countries. Academic authors, and the institutional reward systems that shape their behaviour, continue to associate OA publishing with lower status, a perception that affects submission patterns in ways that are difficult for small publishers to counteract unilaterally. Publishers described a self‑reinforcing dynamic: OA is perceived as less prestigious; high‑profile authors thus submit elsewhere, reducing the visibility and quality of the OA publication, which in turn reinforces the original perception. This cycle was understood as a structural problem of the academic evaluation environment rather than a problem of publishing quality, but its practical consequences for small publishers were nonetheless significant.
Publishers shared related concerns about research integrity and piracy; anxieties about AI‑generated submissions and the misuse of OA content were voiced by multiple participants. These challenges are not unique to small publishers, but the consequences fall disproportionately on organizations that lack the resources for dedicated integrity staff, sophisticated manuscript screening systems or rapid response to suspected misconduct. Several publishers described feeling exposed to risks that they could identify but lacked the capacity to fully address.
Across our interviews and focus groups, publishers offered a nuanced picture of collaboration as both opportunity and risk. Partnerships with peer publishers of comparable size, and with non‑profit infrastructure organizations, were broadly welcomed as a means of sharing costs, developing shared tools and building collective leverage. Collaboration with large commercial publishers raised scepticism: concerns about editorial independence, misalignment of values and the tendency of such partnerships to consolidate rather than redistribute market power were expressed across multiple interviews and focus groups. Publishers were not categorically opposed to engagement with commercial organizations, but they were alert to the structural asymmetries of these partnerships.
The central finding: inequities of scale
Across countries, disciplines and publisher types, participants shared that the most significant barriers to OA adoption were structural. Whether an organization publishes in Denmark or Germany, whether it publishes humanities monographs or scientific journals, whether it operates within a university or independently, the barriers faced are the same; small publishers are disadvantaged by inequities of scale that the existing policy and funding environment does not adequately address.
This inequity is multidimensional. Small publishers face structural imbalance, as large commercial publishers benefit from economies of scale that allow them to spread fixed costs across large article and journal volumes, invest in shared infrastructure and absorb transition costs in ways that are simply unavailable to publishers managing one or two journals. This contributes to a compounding capacity gap between small academic publishers and large commercial ones. These small publishers are financially and operationally at a disadvantage: funding within the publishing ecosystem is disproportionately concentrated in large commercial publishers, whether through transformative agreements, article processing charge income or institutional partnerships. The administrative burden of accessing alternative funding falls heavily on those with the least capacity to manage it, and funding timelines are misaligned with the planning horizons that small publishers require to make sustainable transitions. Small publishers are also under‑represented at a policy level, while large publishers shape the norms, standards and policy frameworks within which all publishers operate, functioning as de facto gatekeepers to infrastructure, indexing and institutional recognition.
These dynamics were recognized by the supporting stakeholders who participated in the second focus group, whose perspectives spanned national policy, institutional leadership, library consortia and publishing infrastructure. Although stakeholders acknowledged these inequities, there was no consensus on how to address them. Funders and policymakers identified legal and institutional constraints on their ability to treat publishers differently on the basis of size and raised questions about the impact of state aid rules and procurement frameworks on proposed solutions like differential compliance requirements, earmarked funding streams and publisher‑specific mandates. Creating and implementing practical solutions to inequities of scale will require co‑ordinated action across funding, policy and institutional domains rather than piecemeal responses from individual organizations. Our recommendations are in support of a co‑ordinated, collaborative response to OA adoption.
Across our interviews with both small publishers and supporting stakeholders, we heard that inequities of scale are the critical barrier small publishers face in the transition to OA. To support their role in bibliodiversity and to ensure their participation in open scholarship, small publishers need stable, long‑term funding from a variety of sources, in addition to peer networks, shared infrastructure and policy recognition.
There needs to be a realignment of incentives and recognition across the academic ecosystem. Addressing the disparity between small and large publishers requires redirecting funding flows, lowering administrative burdens, ensuring fair competition and creating collective infrastructures.
Recommendations
Our recommendations are addressed to the full range of stakeholders who shape the publishing ecosystem – funders, libraries, consortia, universities and policymakers – and are organized across five areas: funding and sustainability, infrastructure and capacity, collaboration and networks, quality, prestige and visibility and policy and equity of scale.
Funding and sustainability
On funding and sustainability, the most urgent priority is to redirect existing resources more equitably. A portion of consortial and library budgets should be ring‑fenced for small and values‑driven publishers, ensuring that money currently concentrated in transformative agreements with large commercial publishers reaches a broader range of organizations. Funding streams must also be stabilized: the short‑term grant cycles that provide support to small publishers are structurally misaligned with the planning horizons that sustainable OA transition requires. Multi‑year, predictable funding would allow small publishers to invest in infrastructure and capacity rather than devoting their limited staff time to repetitive grant applications. Diverse OA models, including diamond OA, Subscribe to Open and collective funding approaches, must all be supported; the ecosystem cannot be built around any single model, and funding frameworks should reflect this. Finally, administrative burdens should be scaled to publisher size: compliance and reporting requirements designed for large organizations impose disproportionate costs on small ones, and funders and consortia should introduce proportionate obligations for smaller applicants.
Infrastructure and capacity
The gap between large and small publishers in technical and operational capability is the product of underinvestment in shared infrastructure. Expanding shared services and national or European platforms would give small publishers affordable access to tools that are currently available only to organizations with dedicated technical teams. Plug‑and‑play toolkits addressing recurring operational needs such as metadata management, integrity screening, peer review workflows and DOI assignment would reduce the burden on staff who are currently required to address each of these challenges from scratch. Investment in training and mentoring is equally important: small publishers need practical guidance on policy compliance, accessibility requirements, the implications of artificial intelligence for their workflows and the mechanics of engaging with libraries and consortia. These are not peripheral concerns, but core operational requirements that small publishers currently absorb without support.
Collaboration and networks
The evidence from this study consistently shows that partnerships between small publishers, and between small publishers and non‑profit infrastructure organizations, are valuable; they are collegial, cost‑sharing and autonomy‑preserving. These relationships should be actively supported and funded. Communities of practice, including the Society Publishers Coalition, the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice, the Open Book Collective and Diamond Capacity Centres, provide effective models for clustering small publishers in ways that reduce isolation and build collective leverage, and they deserve sustained investment. Cross‑border coalitions should be brokered and funded, enabling small publishers to engage with library and consortial groups that are currently beyond their reach. At the same time, it must be recognized that collaboration between small publishers takes place in a competitive context; co‑ordinating mechanisms will be needed to manage conflicts of interest and ensure that collaborative structures serve the interests of participants equitably.
Quality, prestige and visibility
On quality, prestige and visibility, the perception that open access publishing is lower prestige than subscription publishing has material consequences for submission patterns, funding flows, and the long‑term viability of small OA publishers. Addressing it requires action at multiple levels; small publishers that meet rigorous standards should be publicly celebrated and recognized. Registries, awards schemes and formal recognition would help to reframe OA quality on its own terms rather than in relation to the legacy prestige of large subscription journals. Discoverability must be improved through expanded support for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books. Efforts to shift perceptions about prestige must engage the academic communities whose submission decisions ultimately shape the landscape.
Policy and equity of scale
The fragmentation of OA policy across European countries imposes costs on small publishers that are invisible at the level of individual mandates but cumulative in their effect. Aligning OA mandates and support schemes across Europe, or reducing the degree of inconsistency between national requirements, would reduce the compliance burden currently falling on small organizations. Small publishers require longer planning horizons than current policy typically provides: a five‑to‑ten‑year outlook, with stable funding, would allow them to make investment decisions that are currently impossible under annual or short‑term grant cycles. The possibility of differential compliance requirements for small and large publishers should be explored seriously, with attention to the legal and institutional constraints that stakeholders identified as potential barriers. Bibliodiversity must be embedded as an explicit policy goal at both European and national levels, ensuring that the linguistic, regional and disciplinary diversity that small publishers sustain is treated as a public good rather than a marginal consideration. Finally, the engagement of influential subject leaders within research communities is essential to any meaningful cultural shift: change in publishing norms cannot be imposed from outside but must be driven from within the disciplines whose values and practices shape where researchers choose to publish.
Taken together, these recommendations call for a co‑ordinated reallocation of the resources, incentives and responsibilities that currently govern scholarly publishing in Europe. The small publishers who participated are asking for conditions in which their contribution to bibliodiversity and open scholarship can be sustained. Delivering those conditions will require funders, libraries, universities and policymakers to act together, with a shared recognition that the inequities of scale documented here are structural problems that structural interventions must address.
Conclusion
Small publishers play an outsized role in scholarly communication; they are integral within the humanities and social sciences, and they serve regional and linguistic communities that are underserved by large commercial publishers. While small European publishers are supportive of OA, and many are actively transitioning to OA models, they face structural disadvantages that cannot be resolved by individual effort or policy change alone – levelling the playing field for these publishers requires system‑wide rebalancing.
Small publishers require stable funding from a mix of sources, as well as shared infrastructure, peer networks and policy recognition to sustain their role in bibliodiversity. Stakeholders – funders, consortia, libraries, universities and policymakers – must rebalance resources to provide equitable opportunities to these small publishers. Size disparities must be addressed with comprehensive change that realigns incentives and recognition. Culturally, more understanding of the opportunity presented by OA, and changes to the attitudes around prestige publishing, can create an environment in which the benefits of OA models are accessible to everyone.
Funding
This article reports on work commissioned by Knowledge Exchange.
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
One of the authors is a co‑editor of Insights but was not involved in any way during the submission, review or decision‑making about whether or not to publish this article. The authors know of no other competing interests.