The Hidden Costs of Openness: Mapping the Financial Landscape of Scientific Publishing in Poland

Open Access (OA) is no longer a novelty in the Polish academic landscape – it’s a reality. We know why it matters: it democratises knowledge, accelerates discovery, and increases the visibility of research. However, amidst the discussions on policy and mandates, one fundamental question remains surprisingly elusive: how much does it actually cost?

As part of the ongoing collaboration between OPERAS-PL and the SCIROS project, we are seeking answers to this question. Our goal is to map the financial flows of open access in Poland, with a specific focus on what is hidden. While it is relatively easy to track the invoices being paid to commercial giants for gold open access, we have turned our attention to those resources required to sustain the diamond open access model, whose cost assessment is less straight-forward.

This is a report from the field – a glimpse into a ‘work in progress’ as we attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.

The visible and the invisible

When we speak about the costs of open access, the conversation usually drifts toward article processing charges (APCs). These are the visible costs – tangible invoices paid by authors, grants, or institutions, to make an article immediately available. However, beyond these invoices, both major OA models involve ‘hidden costs’, though the term carries a completely different meaning in each case.

In the gold OA model, ‘hidden’ refers to non-transparent accounting. Our research into Poland’s Virtual Library of Science (WBN), managed by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling UW (ICM UW), shows that funding for commercial giants like Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley often flows through ‘Big Deals’ – massive national licenses that bundle subscription fees with publishing rights. Here, costs are hidden because they are administratively blurred; for instance, contracts often artificially shift funds between ‘content access’ and ‘publishing services’ to navigate different VAT rates (5% vs. 23%). Consequently, the real price of a single open-access article becomes lost within the complex bookkeeping of multi-million-złoty agreements.

In contrast, the hidden costs of diamond OA refer to unquantified labor. Diamond OA – the model in which neither the author nor the reader pays – is often championed as the most equitable path for science. Yet, ‘free to read and publish’ does not mean ‘free to produce’. Its costs are invisible not because of complex accounting but because they often don’t generate an invoice at all. This model relies on ‘in-kind’ contributions from the academic community: the voluntary labor of editors, the use of university server space, and administrative support that is absorbed within general institutional budgets rather than being explicitly priced.

A new methodological approach

To capture the full picture, we realised that relying on public financial reports was insufficient – we needed to go deeper. This January, we launched a mixed-method pilot study designed to uncover the true costs of academic publishing across its entire workflow.

We have developed a comprehensive questionnaire, which is currently being distributed to a select group of Polish universities and research institutions. Our primary focus is on those entities that have established strong traditions of independent publishing and are actively engaged in maintaining diamond open access infrastructures.

Unlike standard surveys, which merely ask for budget line items, our methodology focuses on the operational workflow. We are asking institutions to break down the publishing process for journals and monographs into granular tasks: proofreading, typesetting, metadata management, and repository maintenance. We want to know not just how much is being spent, but exactly who performs the work: Is it a dedicated specialist, a generic administrative staff member, or a researcher volunteering their time?

By comparing the workflow costs of the diamond model against the expenditures for the gold (APCs) and green (repository self-archiving) models, we aim to construct the first reliable estimate of what it takes to run a university-led publishing ecosystem in Poland.

The road ahead

This study is currently in its data collection phase. Following the questionnaire, we plan to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews in March 2026. These conversations will allow us to contextualise the raw data, asking the difficult questions that checkboxes cannot answer. We need to understand the human element behind the numbers – the institutional strategies, the friction points, and the hidden labour that keeps the diamond model shining.

We view this research not just as an academic exercise but as a crucial advocacy tool for OPERAS-PL. Understanding the real costs involved is the first step toward securing better funding and recognition for community-owned infrastructure.

We are currently analysing the preliminary data and anticipate moving to the synthesis phase by late spring. The final results will be presented in a forthcoming academic paper, where we hope to offer a robust model for calculating OA costs that can be replicated elsewhere.

For now, the work continues. We are peeling back the layers of budgets and workflows, hoping that by counting the cost of openness we can help build a more sustainable future for it.

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