Why a scholarly communication policy?

Scholarly communication is often treated as a matter of individual choice. Researchers decide where to publish and how to communicate their work. Institutions may provide support, incentives, or infrastructure, but publishing itself is usually seen as a personal act, connected to individual considerations around particular knowledge contributions but also career development and academic status. As a result, scholarly communication systems are often discussed as if they were external constraints that individual researchers simply have to accept as given and navigate accordingly.

At CWTS, we wanted to challenge this convention.

Between late 2024 and early 2026, we developed a new Scholarly Communication Policy that starts from a different premise: how we communicate knowledge is a collective responsibility. Our collective publishing choices shape who can access knowledge, who benefits from it, which infrastructures are strengthened, and ultimately what kind of scholarly communication system we bring into being through our daily practices.

Publishing as a collective responsibility

The policy emerged from a co-creation process involving colleagues across the institute. Rather than treating publishing as a routine academic activity, we started by stepping back to ask a more fundamental question: why do we publish in the first place?

The answer may seem obvious. Scholars and scientists publish because publishing is part of academic work and because we assume that our standing as researchers will be assessed in large part on the basis of publication productivity. Yet especially in the context of perpetually growing volumes of publications and concerns around paper mills and various forms of predatory publishing, treating publishing as an end in itself is no longer an appropriate strategy. Research only matters insofar as it is taken up, discussed, challenged, reused, and translated into action. In other words, publishing is a means of reaching audiences, creating engagement, and contributing to broader debates in society.

This simple observation has important implications for publication strategies. If the purpose of publishing is to reach specific audiences and achieve specific goals, then simply basing publication choices on disciplinary convention or journal prestige seems like a poor strategy. Instead, publication choices should be informed by the audiences we want to engage and the effects we hope to achieve.

In some cases, this may indeed mean publishing in a traditional academic journal. In others, however, a policy brief may be the most effective way to inform science or higher education policy, while releasing a software package or dataset may allow other researchers and practitioners to reuse and build on the work. Preprints, reports, blog posts, workshop summaries, newspaper articles, or podcasts may each reach different audiences and serve different purposes. Scholarly communication is broader than scholarly publishing, and scholarly publishing is broader than journal articles alone.

Toward community-governed publishing

A second motivation behind the policy was growing dissatisfaction with the current open access landscape.

Over the last decade, open access has become an important goal across higher education. This transformation has created undeniable benefits. More research is openly available than ever before. Yet many of the dominant models for achieving open access remain problematic. In particular, the widespread reliance on article processing charges (APCs) shifts the costs of scholarly publishing from readers to authors and their institutions. While publishing inevitably involves costs that must be covered in one way or another, APC-based models create financial barriers for some researchers and institutions and may reinforce existing inequalities within the global research system.

In addition, the transition to open access has left the underlying governance of scholarly publishing mostly unchanged. Many universities devote substantial resources to scholarly publishing without questioning the status quo in which decision-making is largely concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of revenue-driven publishers.

Our policy therefore places particular emphasis on open and community-governed forms of scholarly communication. The central idea is not that commercial involvement or APCs should necessarily be avoided. Rather, we aim to work with infrastructures in which researchers, universities, libraries, and scholarly communities retain meaningful influence over how our publication system is governed and how the knowledge we produce is circulated. This includes publishing using preprint servers, institutional repositories, diamond open access initiatives, society-owned journals, and other forms of community-governed infrastructure.

The cumulative effect of publishing choices

Publishing decisions are often made one article at a time. Yet the cumulative effects of these decisions shape the entire scholarly communication system. When institutions think only at the level of individual publications, they surrender much of their collective agency. Existing publishing structures then appear inevitable, even when many researchers are dissatisfied with them.

By discussing publishing strategically at the institute level, we can begin to reclaim some of that agency. We can coordinate investments, support alternative infrastructures, and agree on new norms for what we consider suitable forms of communication and quality standards. Most importantly, we can more consciously connect our everyday publication choices to broader questions about the function of our particular institutions in society.

Importantly, this does not mean that our policy prescribes a single correct way of publishing. Scholarly communication involves genuine trade-offs. Researchers operate within different disciplinary cultures, career stages, funding environments, and audience expectations. The goal is therefore not to eliminate individual judgement, but to make these trade-offs visible and discussable, while identifying collective strategies for minimising the tensions that underpin the trade-offs.

Part of a broader shift in the Netherlands

The timing of the policy is not accidental.

Across the Netherlands, there is growing recognition that publication practices are not simply the outcome of individual researcher choices but are shaped by institutional cultures and evaluation systems.

Dutch universities, through Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), have begun to emphasise the need to rethink “publication culture” as part of broader Recognition & Rewards reforms. Similarly, NWO commissioned work examining how changing approaches to recognition and evaluation may require changes in how publications themselves are assessed in funding contexts. Our own university has adopted a strategic publication framework in November 2025.

Our policy emerged from this landscape and we hope that it can function as an invitation to other institutes and universities in the Netherlands and abroad to think more deliberately about why we communicate knowledge, whom we want to reach, and what kind of scholarly communication system we want to help build.

We also recognise that not every institute will have the time or capacity to invest in a process as extensive as the one that led to the CWTS policy. For this reason, we see this policy not only as a statement of our own commitments, but also as a resource that others may wish to adapt to their own circumstances. We are happy to share the policy, the materials that informed its development, practical guidance on organising a similar process, and our experiences from the co-creation process. We would also welcome opportunities to present the policy and discuss its underlying ideas with research institutes, faculties, libraries, and university leadership teams interested in exploring how research organisations can exercise greater collective agency over the scholarly communication systems they reproduce through their everyday publishing choices.

Header image by Humble Lamb