The present academic publishing system obstructs the free communication of research findings. By erecting paywalls, commercial publishers prevent scientists from downloading research papers unless they pay substantial fees. Libraries similarly pay huge amounts (up to £1m or more per annum) to give their readers access to online journals.

There is general agreement that free and open access to scientific knowledge is desirable. The way this might be achieved has come to the fore in recent debates about the future of scientific and scholarly journals.

The announcement by the UK government's universities and science minister, David Willetts, of free access to all publicly funded research findings, Jimmy Wales's appointment as a government adviser and Dame Janet Finch's working group set up to advise on open access, all reflect the importance of this issue. Nevertheless, we have a real concern that the process of opening up academic publication may exclude some key interests as a result of the methods used to achieve it.

Our concern lies with the major proposed alternative to the current system. Under this arrangement, authors are expected to pay when they submit papers for publication in online journals: the so called "article processing cost" (APC). The fee can amount to anything between £1,000 and £2,000 per article, depending on the reputation of the journal. Although the fees may sometimes be waived, eligibility for exemption is decided by the publisher and such concessions have no permanent status and can always be withdrawn or modified.

The APC approach is increasingly favoured by funding bodies such as the Wellcome Trust. These funding bodies make provision in academic research grants to pay for publication charges for the research they fund.

A major problem with the APC model is that it effectively shifts the costs of academic publishing from the reader to the author and therefore discriminates against those without access to the funds needed to meet these costs. Among those excluded are academics in, for example, the humanities and the social sciences whose research funding typically does not include publication charges, and independent researchers whose only means of paying the APC is from their own pockets. Academics in developing countries in particular face discrimination under APC because of their often very limited access to research funds.

Not only is APC discriminatory, but within a finite research funding budget its costs are likely to be met from funds otherwise available for the research itself, thereby potentially penalising the whole research community.

There is another approach that could be implemented for a fraction of the cost of commercial publishers' current journal subscriptions. "Access for all" (AFA) journals, which charge neither author nor reader, are committed to meeting publishing costs in other ways. We have been involved with the funding of a journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies (LLCS), which is free for authors and readers, and was initially established with the support of a three-year development grant from the Nuffield Foundation. We don't benefit financially from the journal, and the editorial and reviewing services are supplied free.

The costs for an AFA journal include copy-editing, layout, editorial meetings and journal management, including the peer review process, together with website hosting charges and publishing software support. For LLCS these amount to about £15,000 per year for three issues and are met with the help of the Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies, independent research centres and a nominal readership registration fee.

How can AFA be encouraged? We propose that university libraries set aside some of their journal acquisition funds, currently paid to commercial publishers through bulk arrangements, in the form of grant aid to support new or existing AFA journals. Allocations would take account of the many years it can take to build the readership and submissions base on which the journals' reputation and future viability will depend. Governance details would need to be decided and ideally would involve library consortia, universities, learned societies and research funders.

What we need is some clear thinking about how online publishing should develop. In particular we strongly urge the Finch working group to give serious attention to the alternative AFA strategy for journal funding and for Willetts to adopt it within his vision for open access.

We are not advocating a sudden major shift to this form of publication, rather a funding regime that would encourage its growth and explore how it might best be managed. Such a publication model would not only be cost-efficient, we believe that it would also find greater acceptance within the academic community as a legitimate return on the editorial and refereeing resources that are currently provided for free.

John Bynner is emeritus professor of social sciences in education, Institute of Education, University of London. Harvey Goldstein is professor of social statistics, University of Bristol