Why is change in scholarly communication so hard to imagine? Findings from a stakeholder consultation for the cOAlition S proposal ‘Towards Responsible Publishing’

We analyse focus group discussions and free-text survey responses from a multi-stakeholder consultation conducted after the October 2023 publication of the proposal Towards Responsible Publishing by cOAlition S. The proposal calls for a systemic reform of scholarly communication by reducing barriers to knowledge dissemination, promoting early sharing of outputs through preprints, and shifting peer review to an open, post-publication model. We focus on how different stakeholder groups –such as researchers, infrastructure providers, academic institutions, and publishers –perceive obstacles to the large-scale, coordinated reform envisioned in the proposal. We interpret these accounts as articulations of collective action problems, shaped by entrenchment of many actors in existing academic reward systems and established commercial revenue models that make transitions toward a more economically sustainable scholarly communication system difficult, even where many actors see the principal need for change. This approach highlights the extent to which stakeholder perspectives align or conflict. It also underscores the performative nature of discourse about collective action problems in scholarly communication: by articulating challenges to reform, participants simultaneously construct, reinforce, or contest their own roles within the system, which directly influences their collective capacity to act.