Introduction

America has over 3000 university libraries, multiple stories tall, millions of books, cozy study nooks, and busy study rooms. Yet full access to their contents is often limited to a select few students and faculty. Similarly, online literature is similarly restricted to the same privileged few. While access to education has been freed from the clutches of the privileged, scholarly writing has not. Today, the vast majority of published academic writing lies behind paywalls. If anyone wishes to access research from reputable journals, they must either belong to a university or institution that can afford the subscription or pay the hundreds of dollars in monthly, sometimes daily, fees themselves. 

Exorbitant journal fees are not solely an American problem; for a nation that champions freedom of expression, access to the products of that expression is not free. All too often, freedom of expression is thought of as single-sided: so long as people can speak or write freely without fear, it should be enough. The other side of the equation is completely ignored: how can speech have any kind of impact if the public is unable to access it? Freedom of expression is two-sided, and the ability of people to access information deserves as much attention as their ability to express themselves. 

Accessibility

For the same reason that freedom of expression is considered vital to democracy, freedom of access is necessary to ensure that all those seeking information can access it.

It is true that journals, which consist of the majority of paywalled media, are highly specialized and contain information that ordinary people normally wouldn’t engage with. However, assuming that the American public should not want to engage with the highest caliber of truth and information would impose an artificial barrier on the level and quality of information available to the average person. 

A Profitable Business

The largest obstacle to discussing freedom of accessibility is the delicate balance between capitalistic tendencies and personal liberties. After all, paywalls exist to ensure that journals remain profitable and that there is an incentive for journals to continue publishing. However, for a relatively low-cost industry, academic journals are generating lots of money. The average price of a health sciences journal is $3,135, and the average cost to view just one paywalled article for an unaffiliated scholar is $33.41. Sage Publications, the 5th most prominent publisher of academic writing, earns over $400 million in revenue annually. Springer Nature, another member of the ‘big five’ publishers of scholarly work, announced £1.84 billion in revenue in 2025. Wiley reported revenue of $1.66 billion in FY 2025, and Taylor & Francis reported ​​$698 million dollars of revenue in FY 2024. The publishing industry, especially that of academic journals, exists at an extremely low cost. Most of the time, authors are not paid for the publication of their research, and sometimes, especially for students, they might have to pay journals to publish their work. From these free sources of income, publishing companies will earn a 60% gross profit. When authors submit to a journal, most are required to agree not to submit the work to any other journal and to transfer the copyright to the journal. Never mind the obvious financial loss sustained by the author; copyright transfer means that the vast majority of research is exclusive to a single journal. If one seeks truly unrestricted access to research, a single publication subscription is no longer sufficient. The average discretionary income of Americans is $27,000, with the lowest 20% of earners having no money to spare after necessities. Subscription to multiple thousand-dollar journals is financially unfeasible for most Americans, further restricting public access to research.

Although most publishers offer open-access (free) articles and journals, the number of open-access titles remains a small minority compared to paywalled titles. Taylor & Francis’s website lists over 2,500 journals, yet only 330 are fully open access. Springer Nature hosts over 18 million articles and other media on their website, yet only 2 million of those are open access. A similar story follows most publishers. Further, most major publications require an Article Processing Charge (APC) for authors wishing to publish open access. For Elsevier, whose parent company earned £1.17 billion in adjusted profit in 2024, these fees can range from £500-5000. The existence of APCs removes any financial incentive for authors to publish open access, and only further the financial gain of publications with no cost.  

Policy Options

How should this issue be resolved? America was founded on the ideals of democracy. Today, it stands as a capitalistic giant. Accessibility must strike a balance between these two identities.

1. APCs or anything similar should be banned. Abolishing APCs will remove the financial disincentive to publishing open access and, hopefully, encourage more authors to publish their research that way.

2. Financial incentives should be implemented to encourage open access publication. A complete reversal from APCs, publication of research free to the public should be something rewarded, not financially punished.

3. Institutions that serve the public, such as public libraries, should allocate  a portion of their budget for the purchase of access to specific databases or journals. If a subscription in its entirety is financially unfeasible, consider the implementation of a system that allows users to request the purchase of individual articles from the library. The Boston Public Library provides a good example of this. 

Conclusion

Supporting the actions of these large publications would be to cut off the wings of fledgling researchers before they can even learn to fly. The assumption that only established scholars from established institutions should have access to academic literature is unproductive for the advancement of humanity. America has not come this far by gatekeeping its resources. It has come this far by opening opportunities to others. 

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