Scientific discourse and quality assurance can be improved by open-access (OA) publishing with public peer review and community discussion. Over 25 years, the viability of this approach has been proven by the interactive OA journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) and 18 other journals published by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) and its scientific service provider Copernicus Publications. The success of the EGU journals reflects the benefits of community-driven, interactive OA publishing, including high scientific quality and impact, efficient self-regulation, low cost, and financial sustainability. Since 2001, the EGU has published over 50 000 journal articles, 60 000 preprints and 250 000 comments, utilizing and integrating different OA financing models (green, gold, diamond/platinum). The EGU journals with multi-stage open peer review are linked to the OA repository and interactive community platform EGUsphere and to the virtual scientific highlight magazine EGU Letters, integrating different levels of scientific communication and exchange. The EGU publications combine multiple features of open science, including different forms of open peer review and community evaluation with open-access, open data and open-source elements tailored to the needs and preferences of different disciplines. Indeed, the EGU pioneering approach to transparent peer review has spread to other leading publishers, including the Nature publishing group. We review the approach, achievements and future perspectives of interactive OA publishing (including transformative/institutional agreements and AI/ML tools) and its contribution to a universal epistemic web that captures the scientific discourse and comprehensively documents what we know, how well we know it and where the limitations are.