The End of the Elsevier Era? Five Alternative Publishing Models That Are Already Working in 2026

The title of this article requires an immediate qualification: Elsevier is not ending. In the first quarter of 2026, Springer Nature reported revenue of €1.93 billion for 2025, up 6.2% from the previous year, with strength in full open access publishing. Elsevier continues to process millions of submissions annually. The major commercial publishers are not disappearing — they are adapting, acquiring, and in several cases embedding AI into their workflows in ways that may make them harder to displace rather than easier.

What is ending, more accurately, is the era in which commercial publishers held an unchallenged monopoly on the mechanisms of scientific credibility. The functions that once required a publisher — peer review, curation, quality assessment, discoverability, and the prestige signal that tells other scientists and investors which results to pay attention to — are being disaggregated. Some are being performed by new institutions. Some are being performed by old institutions in new ways. And the researchers who understand which functions matter for their specific purposes are, in 2026, making meaningfully different publishing decisions from those who simply ask "which journal has the highest impact factor?"

This article describes five alternative publishing models that exist and work today — not as theoretical futures but as operational systems that researchers are using and that investors, funders, and evaluation committees are beginning to recognise.

Diamond Open Access — No Fees for Authors or Readers

Diamond open access is the simplest and most radical of the alternative models to describe: journals that charge nothing to authors and make everything free to readers. No article processing charge. No subscription. The publication costs are covered by institutions, learned societies, research councils, or a combination of these. Research outputs are owned by the scholarly communities that produce them.

The number of diamond open access journals has grown substantially since 2020, with significant institutional support from European universities and national research councils who regard the APC model as both inequitable and economically unsustainable. The Directory of Open Access Journals maintains a database of diamond and gold open access journals that is the most reliable starting point for identifying legitimate venues in this category.

The practical challenge for researchers considering diamond open access venues is that the absence of a commercial revenue model means these journals are frequently less well-resourced in terms of production quality, discoverability infrastructure, and editorial bandwidth — not always, but often enough to require careful evaluation before submission.

The strategic opportunity is significant: in a publishing landscape where every other venue either requires authors to pay, requires readers to pay, or both, diamond open access offers genuinely universal visibility at no cost to the author. For researchers at institutions in the CIS, Eastern Europe, or other regions where APC budgets are limited or non-existent, diamond open access venues may be the only route to immediate, unrestricted publication — and the one that aligns most naturally with funder mandates requiring open access without APC eligibility.

Preprint-First / Publish-Review-Curate

The Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model, pioneered at scale by eLife since 2023, represents the most systematic attempt to reorganise the sequence of scientific publishing: make the work public first, review it after, and allow curation to happen transparently and with community input rather than through an opaque editorial decision made before the work is visible.

The PRC approach rethinks scholarly publishing by separating and decentralising the steps of making research public, evaluating it, and giving it visibility and credibility. Research is first shared openly as a preprint, then reviewed transparently and on an ongoing basis, and finally curated by communities, editors, or platforms that assess its relevance and quality. The aim is to make research communication faster, more transparent, and more equitable, while preserving trust through open peer review and curation.

Whether this constituency is large enough to challenge the commercial publishers' market position depends on whether the evaluation infrastructure — career committees, grant panels, investor assessments — begins to weight PRC-published work equally with impact-factor-published work. That transition is underway in some European countries and entirely absent in others.

Overlay Journals — Peer Review on Top of Preprints

The overlay journal model is perhaps the most elegant structural solution to the inefficiency of traditional publishing: journals that perform peer review and publication of record without owning or hosting the underlying articles, which remain permanently on a preprint server. Authors deposit manuscripts in arXiv or HAL and submit them for publication to an epijournal, which adds peer review and a formal publication record to work that is already freely accessible.

The most established overlay journals operate in mathematics and theoretical physics — communities where arXiv has been the primary publication medium for decades. The Discrete Analysis journal, founded by Timothy Gowers, was one of the early high-profile demonstrations that an overlay journal could maintain rigorous peer review standards with essentially zero production costs. SciPost Physics and SciPost Chemistry operate on similar principles in physics and chemistry respectively, funded by institutional consortia rather than author fees.

For researchers in materials science, computational physics, and mathematics, overlay journals represent a legitimate high-credibility publication route that is both free and fully open access. The trade-off is that their prestige signal is less established in career evaluation frameworks than traditional journal metrics, and that discoverability depends more on community engagement than algorithmic promotion.

Subscribe-to-Open — Flipping the Subscription Model

Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) is a model in which subscription-funded journals make all their content open access in years when their subscription revenue meets a defined threshold — funded by libraries and institutions continuing to pay for access, but with the outcome that all content becomes freely available to everyone rather than only to subscribers.

The model was developed to provide a transition pathway for subscription journals that want to move toward open access without imposing APCs on authors — a route that maintains the existing funding relationship between libraries and publishers while changing the output from paywalled to open. Annual Reviews, the Royal Society, and a growing number of smaller society publishers have implemented S2O schemes.

The practical benefit for researchers is that S2O journals maintain the traditional journal format, impact factor infrastructure, and editorial standards without requiring authors to pay APCs. The limitation is that the open access is contingent on subscription targets being met — a structural fragility that more committed open access advocates cite as a reason S2O is a transitional rather than a terminal model.

Community-Governed Open Infrastructure — Science at the Service Level

The fifth and most technically complex alternative model is not a specific type of journal but a type of infrastructure: community-governed platforms that provide the functional components of scientific publishing as shared public infrastructure rather than commercial services.

The key examples in 2026 include: OpenAlex, the open bibliographic database that now indexes 265 million research papers with full metadata available via API; Zenodo, the CERN-hosted research data repository that has become the primary home for datasets, code, and research outputs that do not fit traditional journal formats; Open Citations, which makes citation data freely available rather than licensing it commercially; and Crossref, the non-profit that manages DOI registration for the majority of academic publications and makes its metadata available for open research.

The community-governed infrastructure model matters for researchers not primarily as a venue for publishing papers but as the technical substrate that makes alternative models viable. The reason overlay journals, diamond OA publications, and PRC platforms can function without commercial publisher investment is that the underlying infrastructure — identifier systems, metadata standards, citation tracking — is increasingly provided as public goods by non-profit organisations. The commercial publishers' sustainable advantage over the next decade may lie less in their editorial functions than in their commercial AI integrations, brand relationships with specific communities, and marketing infrastructure — precisely the functions that are hardest to replicate with community governance alone.

What This Means in Practice: A Decision Framework for 2026

The existence of five viable alternative models does not mean that every researcher should immediately abandon commercial publishers. The practical decision of where to submit any given paper depends on a set of considerations that varies by field, by institutional context, by career stage, and by the specific function the publication is meant to serve.

• Goal: Investor credibility

  Choose peer-reviewed journals with established evaluation processes

  Whether a journal is Elsevier-published or diamond open access matters less than whether it is indexed, has clear peer review criteria, and is associated with a recognisable editorial community. The investor due diligence process applies equally to SciPost Physics as to Physical Review Letters — the question is whether the venue is credible, not whether it is commercial.

• Goal: Funder compliance

  Choose diamond open access or preprint-first

  Horizon Europe does not cover APCs in hybrid journals, and the trajectory of European funder policy is clearly toward mandating immediate open access without APC as the default. Diamond open access and PRC models align most naturally with this direction.

• Goal: Maximum speed to visibility

  Choose preprint-first — no other model is faster

  Preprint-first is the only model that provides same-day publication of citable results. The arXiv timing effect — where position in the daily announcement affects long-term citation counts — applies only in a preprint-first culture, and is not available at all in traditional subscription or gold OA journals.

• Goal: Long-term field-building

  Choose diamond open access in underrepresented subfields

  Contributing to diamond open access venues in underrepresented subfields — particularly in the CIS, Eastern European, and Mediterranean research communities — is the most direct way to build the open scientific infrastructure that makes AI-assisted research acceleration possible in those communities. The narrowing of science described earlier in this series is, in part, a consequence of the concentration of accessible literature in commercial databases. Diamond and community-governed open access directly addresses this.

The Elsevier era is not ending. But the era in which Elsevier's model was the only credible one has unambiguously passed. In its place is a more complex, more contested, and ultimately more interesting landscape — one in which the question "where should I publish?" has more good answers than it did five years ago, and in which the best answer depends on understanding what each model does, for whom, and at what cost.