There was a time when choosing a font wasn’t just about taste — it was about access, licensing, and platform compatibility. That quiet revolution in typography mirrors another one still playing out in academic publishing: the shift in how research is accessed, distributed, and credited.
Let’s begin with the fonts.
Type1 fonts, created by Adobe in the 1980s, were professional grade and widely used in early desktop publishing. But they were also proprietary. You needed a license to use them and embedding them in documents came with restrictions and costs. Fonts like Adobe Garamond and ITC Avant Garde Gothic were part of this era — elegant, powerful, and locked down.
Around the same time Adobe introduced PostScript fonts, long-established type foundries like Linotype and Monotype began digitizing their own libraries using the same format. Though compatible with Adobe’s system, these fonts were independently designed and sold — part of a broader shift as traditional typesetting houses adapted to digital publishing. For example, Adobe Garamond, Monotype Garamond, and ITC Garamond all shared the same historical roots but were released as distinct digital interpretations.
Then came TrueType, developed by Apple and later licensed to Microsoft.It simplified font rendering, gave designers more control, and could be bundled freely with operating systems. Fonts such as Times New Roman, Georgia, Arial, and Verdana became standard fare in documents not because they were remarkable, but because they were available — and free.
OpenType followed in the early 2000s, developed jointly by Microsoft and Adobe to combine the best of both previous systems. It supported multilingual text and extended character sets, making it ideal for global publishing. Fonts like Calibri, Cambria, and Minion Pro were born of this era —clean, efficient, and cross-platform.
Eventually, licensing gave way to openness. With the rise of GoogleFonts and open-source libraries like Adobe Fonts and Font Library, high-quality fonts like Roboto, Lato, Inter, and Source Sans Pro became available to anyone— no fees, no restrictions, no second thoughts.
The transition from restricted fonts to open ones didn’t happen overnight. It was layered — shaped by technical innovation, user demand, and a growing expectation that access should be easier.
In scholarly publishing, subscription models were once the default. Readers — or more often, their institutions — paid to access content, while authors paid little to publish. Journals built reputations behind high paywalls.
Hybrid journals emerged as a halfway step, allowing authors to pay for individual articles to be made open, while the rest of the journal remained closed. This model became popular in titles like PNAS and many IEEE publications — flexible but unevenly understood.
Open access eventually took hold in earnest. Gold OA models led the way, with journals like PLOS ONE and eLife offering full openness in exchange for article processing charges. Green OA allowed authors to archive copies in institutional repositories. Diamond OA removed fees altogether, opening up access for both readers and authors.Bronze OA added a wrinkle: articles made freely accessible by the publisher, but without a clear license.
Layered onto all of this were transformative agreements — contracts between publishers and institutions that shifted budgets from reading to publishing. Read-and-Publish and Publish-and-Read models became common in arrangements with Springer Nature, Wiley, and others.
You don’t need to squint to see the parallel. Fonts and publishing models may belong to different worlds, but they’ve both followed a familiar arc — from proprietary systems to open ecosystems. From locked formats to global accessibility.
Type 1 was like the traditional subscription model — effective, polished, but gated. TrueType marked the hybrid phase — more flexible, easier to adopt. And OpenType, alongside the rise of Google Fonts, reflects the ethos of open access: universal, platform-neutral, and designed for reusability.
Both systems started with locked doors and ended up building bridges.The path wasn’t straight, and the models weren’t always simple.
Today, using a typeface like Roboto or Inter is frictionless. The rules are clear. The formats are standardized. The tools are built to accommodate them.
Publishing, on the other hand, is still figuring things out. Authors, institutions, and readers are navigating a landscape that includes licenses, embargoes, repositories, funders, and fees. The models are more flexible, but also more complex.
There’s no punchline here. No bold declaration. Just two arcs of change — one typographic, one academic — that reflect something deeper about how knowledge travels, who shapes it, and how it’s shared.
Change can be quiet, layered, and still transformative — and sometimes, the most fundamental shifts start with how we choose to share.
