A new report from PLOS, "Redefining Publishing: Practical pathways to open science", sets out a practical roadmap for how scholarly publishing can evolve beyond article-centered and APC-driven models to better support open science. The report points to growing pressure on existing publishing models, underlines the need for coordinated action beyond publishing, and outlines practical pathways to address challenges.
The findings come from an 18-month research and design project, involving researchers, funders, institutional leaders, librarians, and infrastructure providers across the global research ecosystem. The project was generously supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Structural pressures across the research ecosystem
The report argues that article-centered publishing and assessment systems no longer reflect how research is conducted today. Modern research increasingly depends on a wide range of outputs, from data and code to methods and workflows. However, the journal article remains the primary unit of recognition, which limits visibility and reuse of other critical research contributions.
As the report describes, "The journal article remains an important and widely understood unit of communication. However, it no longer captures the full range of contributions, relationships, and outputs that modern research depends on."
The report also highlights growing concern that APC-based publishing models reinforce article-centered incentives, create barriers to participation, and are poorly aligned with the broader goals of open science. While APCs have played a key role in expanding open access to date, stakeholders have highlighted concerns about affordability, participation, and the sustainability of models that continue to prioritize the article as the dominant output. Institutions are increasingly seeking to explore alternative approaches that better reflect the full range of research activities.
One of the report's strongest findings, which came out of an independent economic analysis commissioned by PLOS, is that open science delivers the greatest economic and societal value when research outputs are designed for reuse at scale. Data, code, and related resources can reduce duplication, accelerate discovery, and enable innovation, but only if supported by infrastructure, standards, metadata, and incentives that make reuse practical.
New pathways to support open science
To address these challenges, the report introduces the concept of a "knowledge stack", a publishing model that connects articles and preprints with associated outputs–data, code, methods, and materials–to create a structured, open, machine-readable record that reflects the research process and credits everyone who contributed. Rather than centralizing research outputs inside new proprietary systems, the report argues for interoperable approaches that build on repositories, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, and open protocols already used across the research ecosystem.
The report emphasizes that improving visibility alone is not enough. Broader adoption of non-article outputs depends on strengthening trust, usability, and recognition. This includes clearer attribution for contributors, improved metadata, layered contextual information, and practical signals of quality that allow outputs to be interpreted, examined, and reused.
As AI systems increasingly rely on scientific literature and metadata, the report argues that open science infrastructure must become more structured, transparent, and machine-readable to support trust, verification, and responsible reuse.
Coordinated action to address challenges
Importantly, the findings stress that broader system change will require coordinated action beyond publishing alone. The report argues that publishers are not neutral intermediaries. By determining what is made visible, connected, evaluated, and rewarded, publishing models play an active role in shaping research incentives, recognition, and behavior, across the research ecosystem. Meanwhile, research assessment systems, funding structures, and institutional incentives continue to prioritize traditional outputs, limiting progress toward more open and inclusive practices.
As Alison Muddit, PLOS' CEO, notes in the report, "No single organization can redefine the structures that govern research funding, dissemination, recognition, or assessment. But each of us has a role to play in moving the system forward."
The report also stresses that open science cannot be advanced through one-size-fits-all approaches. Differences in funding structures, infrastructure maturity, and policy environments mean that regional collaboration and locally grounded solutions are essential to avoid reinforcing global inequalities.
Next steps
While no single organization can solve systemic problems alone, PLOS says the next phase of work will focus on practical experimentation, including targeted pilots, infrastructure collaboration, open-source development, and continued testing of new publishing capabilities and business model approaches. Initial implementation will focus on data and code, the most practical and policy-relevant starting points for PLOS, with new approaches to attribution, contextual linking, and checkability.
In all, the new PLOS report describes scholarly publishing as being at a critical inflection point, where meaningful progress toward open science will depend on aligning infrastructure, incentives, funding models, and research assessment practices, alongside sustained collaboration across publishers, funders, institutions, infrastructure providers, and regional partners.
The report concludes that practical experimentation, shared infrastructure, and coordinated reform are now essential to building a research system that supports open science at scale.
