Each year, the Charleston Conference challenges us to look squarely at the systems we’ve built and to imagine something better. This year’s session, Beyond the Article: Reimagining Scholarly Communication for Equity, Impact, and the Future, brought together three perspectives from across the scholarly communication ecosystem: Chris Bourg (Director of Libraries, MIT), Stephen Rhind-Tutt (CEO, Coherent Digital), and me. Our goal was to ask, collectively: what would it take to make the scholarly communication system truly equitable, impactful, and future-ready?

In different ways, each of us argued that transformation is long overdue. The research enterprise has changed profoundly, yet our publishing and funding models remain tethered to a narrow conception of what counts as scholarship, who can participate, and how impact is measured. Traditional articles and journals continue to dominate, consuming the bulk of academic library budgets and publisher investment alike. Meanwhile, the real engines of research — data, code, protocols, software, and an increasingly diverse set of outputs — remain undervalued and underfunded.

What unites our perspectives is a conviction that the system’s problems are structural, not technical. The technologies to share, preserve, and connect knowledge already exist. What’s missing is the will — and the reallocation of resources — to use them differently.

A Manifesto for Radical Reinvestment

Chris opened the session with characteristic clarity and urgency. Her talk, Beyond the Article: A Rallying Cry for Libraries, called on libraries to reclaim their public mission by divesting from closed and reinvesting in openness.

For decades, libraries have been the moral conscience of scholarly communication, devoted to the ideal that knowledge should be collected, preserved, and shared for the public good. Yet, as Chris reminded us, they have for decades spent billions not to create or disseminate knowledge, but to rent access to it. That spending sustains a publishing economy that monetizes public knowledge and reproduces inequity.

Chris argued that it’s no longer enough to negotiate better deals or build parallel open systems on the margins. Libraries must stop funding the very structures that make knowledge scarce and redirect those resources to community-owned repositories, scholar-led journals, and nonprofit infrastructures.

Chris’s vision was both radical and pragmatic:

• Back in 2017, David Lewis published a paper arguing that libraries should commit 2.5% of their total budgets to organizations and projects that contribute to the common digital infrastructure needed to support the open scholarly commons. Chris argued that 2.5% was never going to be enough and made a much more radical proposal that 100% of collections budgets should be redirected toward open infrastructures.
• Ensure that openness does not replicate exclusion by prioritizing models that are globally inclusive and accessible to scholars without author-pays funding.

“Every renewal or cancellation,” she said, “is a declaration of our values.”

The power of that framing lies in its simplicity: every dollar spent on maintaining the status quo is a dollar not spent on building the future. Her talk challenged us to treat budgets as instruments of moral and systemic change, to make financial choices that align with the public mission of libraries and the academy.

From Prestige to Impact

Stephen extended this argument from ethics to outcomes. His talk reframed the purpose of the university: not to sustain journals or rankings, but to deliver real impact, to make knowledge useful to society.

His central claim was that the purpose of research communication — and indeed the business of libraries — is not to sustain journals, but to deliver impact. Whether advancing policy, solving community problems, or fueling innovation, universities and their libraries exist to connect knowledge with the world.

Yet, as Stephen observed, today’s incentive structures reward prestige over impact. University rankings and research assessment frameworks continue to value publication in high-impact-factor journals, reinforcing a cycle that privileges quantity and venue over value and use. Crucially, this system also ignores the vast amount of research produced beyond this system: much of this grey literature is where research gathers impact and is more useful and practical in the real world. 

His argument was ultimately one of redefinition. In this realignment Chris had called for, what if libraries also redirected attention and investment to maximize societal impact rather than perpetuating the prestige economy? Plenty of data supports the value of grey literature, libraries have the skills needed to manage and drive impact – and some are already beginning to do so. Where Chris urged libraries to divest from enclosure, Stephen showed what that reinvestment could achieve.

Moving Beyond the Article

Sandwiched between Chris and Stephen, I wanted to both acknowledge publishers’ complicity and look toward what reinvention might look like from within. I began with an uneasy question: what if open access has succeeded technically but failed structurally? When PLOS was founded just over two decades ago, open access promised to democratize knowledge, dismantle monopolies, and make science more efficient and equitable. And by some measures, it has succeeded. Roughly half of all published research today is openly accessible — a remarkable shift. But beneath that progress, the deeper goals of openness — equity, efficiency, and systemic transformation — remain largely unfulfilled.

We’ve replaced one kind of paywall with another. APCs, meant to remove barriers to reading, have created barriers to authorship. “Transformative” agreements have transformed little, and market concentration has deepened.

Publishers are easy targets for blame — and not without reason. But we operate within an academic culture that remains deeply conservative and metrics-obsessed. We assess researchers by the journal titles on their CVs, not by the quality or openness of their contributions. We celebrate transparency and collaboration, but rarely reward them. Even at PLOS, where we’ve long championed data sharing, only about a third of authors consistently deposit their data. Not because they reject openness, but because it doesn’t count. The incentives that govern research assessment, funding, and publishing are misaligned with the values we claim to uphold.

Designing for the Future

My analysis above is hardly novel, but for years, we have found ourselves buried in a collective action problem that prevents forward momentum. At PLOS, we’re now more than a year into our research and design work to redefine a future beyond articles and APCs. The article has served science well for centuries, but it was never designed for the complexity of modern research. Science today is modular, iterative, and collaborative; yet we continue to distill it into static artifacts.

Through this R&D work, we’re experimenting with the concept of the Knowledge Stack — a framework that treats research not as a single product, but as a constellation of connected outputs: data, code, methods, analyses, peer reviews, and subsequent updates. The goal is not to replace journals and articles, but to rebalance them as just one node in a larger, living ecosystem of knowledge. In such a system, every contribution can be cited, reused, and evaluated in its own right.

Every dollar we spend either reinforces or reforms the system.

Rethinking the Economics of Open

But design alone isn’t enough. As Chris reminded us, every dollar we spend either reinforces or reforms the system. The APC model was created with good intentions —  indeed, PLOS helped pioneer it — but it has become one of the largest barriers to progress in open science. In the second part of our R&D work, we’ve been developing a new model that defines publishing as a shared service supporting the research enterprise. The idea is to treat publishing outputs as public goods, sustained through collective investment rather than per-piece payments.

We understand that this is a lot more difficult than it sounds. The challenges of supporting open infrastructure have been well rehearsed elsewhere, and we only have to look at the miserable budgets that we expect critical organizations such as ORCID to operate on to see this. As Cameron Neylon and others have argued, the challenge of resourcing shared infrastructures is not primarily technical, but political and economic – a textbook collective action problem. The provision of shared scholarly infrastructure operates somewhere between a public and a club good: we aspire for knowledge to be universally available, yet in practice it is sustained through partially exclusive, community-based arrangements. This means that neither the market nor the state alone can solve the problem. Progress depends on identifying the right scale and community structures to coordinate investment – something that is hard to do across thousands of institutions. Any proposal that begins, “we’ll just get all the universities to do X”, Neylon reminds us, is doomed without built-in coordination mechanisms or incentives for participation.

Ultimately, it only works if libraries and consortia — the communities Chris was calling on to redirect their budgets — collaborate with like-minded publishers and other stakeholders to design and sustain shared infrastructures. Encouragingly, we’re already seeing this happen through community-led pilots and collective funding models that emphasize transparency and co-design. If publishers and libraries align their financial models around shared values, real systemic change becomes possible.

As Samuel Moore argues in his recent book, Publishing Beyond the Market, open access isn’t just about tearing down paywalls — it’s about who controls the systems that make research possible. He cautions that initiatives like Plan S can easily replicate the same market dynamics they aim to disrupt unless openness is paired with genuinely scholar-led, community-governed publishing. It’s a useful reminder that making knowledge open also means rethinking where power and ownership reside.

Toward a Collective Future

As our panel closed, what struck me most was how complementary our perspectives were. Chris’s call for radical reinvestment, Stephen’s insistence on impact, and my own argument for rearchitecting publishing are, at heart, different expressions of the same imperative: to realign the scholarly communication system with its public mission.

But waiting for alignment to emerge is itself a choice, and it’s one that perpetuates the status quo. Each of us operates within a small sphere of agency, and change will only come if we begin acting within those spheres, however imperfectly.

Open access began as a radical act — a refusal to accept that knowledge created with public funds should be locked behind paywalls. That spirit still matters. But the next stage of openness demands something harder than protest: collective design. We have to reimagine the structures of reward, recognition, and investment so that they reinforce, rather than erode, the values we claim to share.

And yet, that vision collides with reality. The system we inhabit wasn’t built through coordinated planning — it evolved through decades of accumulated choices, entrenched incentives, and asymmetric power. No single actor — not libraries, publishers, funders, or universities — can unilaterally fix it. This is the definition of a wicked problem: everyone depends on everyone else to move first, and so too often, no one moves at all.

But waiting for alignment to emerge is itself a choice, and it’s one that perpetuates the status quo. Each of us operates within a small sphere of agency, and change will only come if we begin acting within those spheres, however imperfectly. That means:

• Libraries are taking calculated risks to redirect even a fraction of collection budgets toward openness (and critically, away from subscriptions where so much money still sits). 
• Publishers are experimenting with publishing and business models that reward transparency, reproducibility, and reuse rather than volume.
• Funders and institutions are shifting assessment criteria, even incrementally, to recognize the full ecosystem of research outputs.

None of this will be linear. Progress will be uneven, contested, and at times uncomfortable. But it is precisely in moments of instability that the ground becomes fertile for transformation. Across the globe, and especially in the U.S., universities and the research enterprise are under sustained attack: politically, financially, and ideologically. Their value is being questioned just as the complexity of the world’s problems makes them more essential than ever. If these pressures expose the fragility of our systems, they also create an opportunity to rebuild them stronger, fairer, and more resilient.

Real alignment won’t come from any single reform or organization. It will emerge from the cumulative effect of deliberate, aligned choices — in budgets, policies, and practices — made across the system. The question is no longer whether change is possible, but whether we will claim our share of responsibility for making it inevitable.

(Note that all Charleston presentations will be available online soon so you can watch in full if you’re interested!)