To Complete the Open Access Transition, First Ask the Right Questions

Open access outputs—particularly of journal articles—have grown considerably over the last 25 years, from a few percent of articles being openly available in the early 2000s to around 30 percent of published papers becoming accessible without paywalls by the 2010s (Heidbach et al., 2022).

Per the Curtin Open Knowledge Institute (COKI) (Diprose et al., 2023), 50 percent of journal content published from 2010 to the end of 2024 is openly available, sometimes in more than one place:

Clocking the rise of open access deals in recent years, Time magazine included “more open access” as one of the ways the world got better in 2023.

We see the same trends in analysis of publishing data from members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), which range from scholar-led journals and fully open access and mixed-model publishers of all types and sizes, to open books, infrastructures, platforms, and other open access service providers. (I am OASPA’s program manager.) Through the end of 2023, the total number of open access journal articles from our members had quadrupled since 2017 and grown over 32 times since 2011 (Figure 2).

OASPA is a network—offering connection and guidance on open access to the entire scholarly communications sector and screening membership applications/working with applicants on their open access practices to provide an indicator that the work of member organizations meets quality standards (including the joint principles of transparency and best practice). At the same time, OASPA is also a not-for-profit foundation with a mission to advance open access as the predominant model for scholarly publication. By this yardstick, we should be delighted at the various graphs and charts above that tell us that roughly half the journey to 100 percent open access is complete.

But what counts beyond the number of articles? Producing more open access content (or converting more paywalled content to open access) isn’t going to work unless we also ask deeper questions: open access how, and open for whom?

What’s wrong?

If we step away from counting outputs and listen—listen through one-on-one conversations, listen through workshops and interviews that create space for stakeholders to talk about the issue of exclusion in publishing, and listen by commissioning and assimilating research that is not driven solely by quantitative metrics—different pictures emerge. They reveal consolidation in the ways we are achieving open access (predominantly via publication-level and/or author-facing fees) and the absence of perspectives of who and what from the output-driven data we often spend time on. After over four years of “listening work” at OASPA, we recognize that today’s mature open access movement is only serving a subset of the world’s scholars (more on these themes under Further Reading at the end of this article, and also under Asare-Nuamah, 2023 and Druelinger & Ma, 2023).

Per-publication charge and author-fee models can do a lot to further open knowledge, and it is excellent that about half of published research is available open access. But these predominant routes to open access, largely based on practices standard in (or influenced by) regions of the Global North, have the unintended consequence of disadvantaging or excluding many scholars, and can hinder open publishing across the globe, despite waiver programs (Druelinger & Ma, 2023).

Adding to the complexity, rich countries do have many underfunded authors, and low- and middle-income countries do have authors with access to funds, including funding to pay article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing. So, solutions based on geography or location or affiliation of the author can only go so far.

This imbalance can only be rectified with more (and more investment in) models and workflows that welcome content from all scholars, without discrimination on the basis of who can pay, or who has funds, or who is affiliated somewhere that is covered by a publishing deal to enable open access.

An analysis from Delta Think in October 2024 concludes that the open access share of scholarly output is now “struggling to get beyond 50%.” But if routes and workflows for open access remain largely as they are today, even in a 100 percent open access world, we would still only see the openly published outputs from that subset of scholars who benefit from, or who are most easily able to navigate, the way the system currently works: select authors, those funded by select sources and/or based at select institutions.

A comparison between Brazil, which spends less on APCs and receives lower citation scores for its published outputs, and the Netherlands, which pays out more in APCs and read and publish deals and sees higher citation scores for outputs, is a case in point. While Brazilian investment in “golden” open access publishing is shown to be small compared to the Netherlands, these costs are relatively high if the social-economic situation of Brazil is considered. The authors also touch on APC-free journals and demonstrate that “being open is about more than access” by pointing to the role of the Portuguese language in the Brazilian publishing system and describing limitations in indexing and recognition for scholars in the Global South. So, we see how barriers to publishing open access have “unseen costs” that are additional to the financial challenge of paying fees; these unseen costs include invisibility of work from countries like Brazil and of outputs from those who work in languages other than English. The authors conclude: “While open access publishing was intended to further equality, we now witness a higher chance of scholars being excluded from publishing” (Brasil & van Leeuwen, 2022).

Open access is further impeded by a host of other issues: a narrow focus on narrative articles; the ways we define and measure quality and trustworthiness in open access publishing (and who gets to judge what the standards of quality should look like); the notion of prestige; the issue of prejudice; and the challenges to editorial practice, policy, and integrity posed by an output-oriented, per-publication system—more acute today with the rise of paper mills and artificial intelligence.

But something else is stalling the transition, described by Ádám Dér in a recent Katina article: the traditional subscription model of old, with its associated paywalls, still persists.

Course correction?

A successful transition to open access is one in which everyone can read and reuse scholarly work and everyone can publish open access. So, the true transition is not just moving from around 50 percent paywalled content to 100 percent open access, but also enabling a system that is open for all—all authors and all ways of knowing.

Of course, open access publishing requires financial support. Payments for and investments in open access publishing could work in a variety of ways to enable more inclusive open access. (I list many options later in this article.) At its core, the course correction work involves developing revised and reimagined funding streams that ensure all authors can benefit without incurring personal costs and regardless of their location or affiliation. But such changes cannot happen without more trust between publishing organizations and those who pay for, fund, and invest in publishing services. (See resources on “Money flows and trust signals…” as well as “Trust as the new prestige” under Further Reading.)
So, open for whom? Open how? Open at what cost? These are questions we have been exploring with our network as we work toward a vision of an open access future that has a diversity of models and approaches and is grounded in fair, inclusive, and transparent practices.

Our work toward this vision includes the release of OASPA's recommendations on financial and workflow barriers to equity in open access (Legge, 2024). Openly published in December 2024, these recommendations were born from:

• Work on the “OA market" (see “OA market” resources under Further Reading)
• Our workshop series in 2023, where OASPA convened institutional libraries and publishing organizations across 32 countries (see Further Reading on OASPA’s 2023 workshops)
• The request for OASPA to release recommendations (which emerged from an interactive feedback-session polling 112 participants at our 2023 annual conference)
• Peer review, open consultation, and revision that brought in a range of inputs to balance, clarify, and round out our thoughts.

The resulting recommendations support five goals addressing financial and workflow-related aspects of exclusion in open access scholarly publishing:

Details under each goal shown here are structured to allow every organization to engage. Some lofty ambitions (like redeveloping the basis for pricing and co-developing funding streams to support open access for all scholars without exception) require wider rethinking. However, we’ve also made suggestions that are specific and approachable (like explaining how open access is being achieved, or clarifying and making annual checks of waiver policy and related workflows). So we hope that organizations using or supporting any model can see ways to make progress, whatever their starting point.

The most ambitious and demanding aspirations in our work are expressed through goals meant for all stakeholders. The first two goals—enabling open access for all scholars and evolving pricing, purchasing, funding, and investment practices—are for publishing organizations as well as those who purchase, pay for, or invest in scholarly publishing. Publishing organizations cannot make fundamental shifts on their own. Librarians, consortia, and those who fund or pay for or invest in publishing services are key partners. We suggest they are co-creators of the path forward, with the ability to evaluate publishing programs and with influence over what they support—or don’t.

Inherent here is a tension—open access for some or enable it for all? “Open for some” is better than for none, and “open for some” models are often seen as less complicated and more practical than “open for all.” This is because there are well-established and standardized ways of thinking about and managing models, portfolios, workflows, and budgets, and it is hard to think outside the status quo. If, therefore, our first two goals seem to challenge the fundamentals of how and why payments for scholarly outputs and publishing services work, then we are approaching the sort of truly transformative course correction that is needed.

And there is no better moment for course correction: now before we perpetuate imbalances further, and in the US context, now in constructive resistance to unprecedented attacks from the government on higher education, undermining diversity and withdrawing from funding and supporting the research agenda—alarming developments causing scholarly communities to be confused, censored, unpaid, “apoplectic”, and moved to activism. (Resonating with these reactions to the turmoil experienced in the US is Katina’s own commitment to “impact and damage” reporting.)

OASPA’s goals #3 and #4 (for publishing organizations)—describing models and pricing with accuracy, detail, and transparency and reducing barriers and burdens in OA workflows—are about harnessing editorial policy, financial policy, and operations in combination to make open access workflows less burdensome for scholars. Researchers who use a waiver or discount in article-fee models often need to be willing to accept the power dynamics of hoops that need to be jumped (application, verification, eligibility confirmation). Acknowledging that scholars deal with the dual helpful/harmful nature of the waivers system, we provide new definitions for the terms “waivers,” “unfunded authors,” and “per-publication charges” in the recommendations; and our goals #3 and #4 overlap with the latest guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on author fees and waivers.

Show me how it’s done?

Organizations that have found ways to deliver, or support, more inclusive practices across all open access models are making a real difference. From over 200 journals in the Subscribe to Open Community of Practice to the library membership scheme at punctum books, and from the Sri Lanka Journal of Child Health to evaluation frameworks such as the Library Partnership Rating rubric, OASPA has created a collection of inclusive practices in a wide range of publishing contexts across the global open access network.

OASPA’s Wayfinders series supplements this effort, offering in-depth online conversations and case studies that are free to attend and openly available for repeat viewing. OASPA is only able to point to such examples due to growing awareness of the need for open access publishing that dismantles and disrupts author-side fees to read or to publish.

“Open for all” is not a new concept, and there is more than one way to publish content for which both reading and open access publishing are fee-free for all scholars. We note collective, cooperative, membership, partnership, sponsored, grant-funded, institution-funded, agreement-based, and other models—plus blended strategies that combine approaches (sometimes including optional article fees). Ways of delivering open access, particularly more inclusive open access, are still emerging. So trials, adaptations, and fledgling programs prioritizing open access with inclusion are in need of stability and support.

Is that all?

Addressing payment barriers via open access models and workflows will not solve all issues. A significant share of scholarly knowledge exists in formats and languages that are often unrecognized or dismissed. OASPA’s recommendations do not address this, nor do they provide means to refresh approaches to governance and representation, tackle prejudice, or recalibrate power imbalances to improve the referencing, recognition and, indeed, celebration of academic expertise from all world regions.

Geopolitical factors and variance in funding policy across regions complicates the picture considerably. But, when we think about payments, deals, mechanisms, or collaborations to support open scholarship, it’s not just the oft-mentioned challenges of bandwidth issues, sales negotiations, and budgetary limitations that should hold our attention. We should also open our minds to completely new ways of doing things, ask what a full spectrum of open knowledge outputs should look like, and learn from others. Knowledge can look and be transmitted in ways far beyond the established units of articles, journals, or chapters that we are most familiar with.

An anonymous response to OASPA’s open consultation on our recommendations said: “The world has much to learn from those who operate with limited resources.” Another comment said: “Sometimes it is the human aspect of cultural change that is required.”

In the face of such a wide scope, the work of transitioning from approximately 50 percent open access to a fully and truly open access future for everyone requires stamina and a willingness to keep learning while taking intentional, focused action where one feels best informed.

So, the bigger questions we are asking are:

1. What do we mean when we talk about “moving” to open access or “the transition” to open access? Is it fully open for all, everywhere? How do we enable an open access future with diverse publishing options where all scholars can fully participate?
2. Should we have open access at any cost? What is the cost to human society if the scholarship of only a subset of authors is openly available for all to read?
3. How much can we gain from “open for all”? What happens when we treat budgets as a power that can unlock pathways to knowledge, and the expression of knowledge, from and for all?
4. How does our perception change based on who an author is, where they are affiliated (if at all), and how well they speak/write in English? Do we see all authors as an authority?
5. What needs to change so we see the value in learning from every human story and all ways of knowing?

At OASPA we may be recommending, showcasing, and questioning, but we are also listening, and we will continue to address the challenges in the transition to open access (in its fuller sense). In 2025, we will convene cross-stakeholder conversations around a transition for the “next 50 percent” of paywalled content in a way that broadens participation, with barrier-free read access and open access publishing for all scholars, everywhere.

OASPA welcomes feedback on our ongoing efforts.

This month, many across the US are rallying “because science is for everyone.” Let’s make it so, we say, by working together to ensure the transition to open scholarship serves everyone.

References

Asare-Nuamah, P. (2023). Open access without open publication creates inequality for researchers in the Global South. AfricArXiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/3b2160cd.ce64eec5

Brasil, A., & van Leeuwen, T. (2022). The unseen costs of article processing charges: The different realities of Brazil and the Netherlands. In N. Robinson-Garcia, D. Torres-Salinas, & W. Arroyo-Machado. (Eds). 26th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, STI 2022. https://zenodo.org/records/6966707

Diprose, J., Hosking, R., Rigoni, R., Roelofs, A., Chien, T., Napier, K., Wilson, K., Huang, C., Handcock, R., Montgomery, L., & Neylon, C. (2023). A User-Friendly Dashboard for Tracking Global Open Access Performance. The Journal of Electronic Publishing 26(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3398

Druelinger, D., & Ma, L. (2023) Missing a golden opportunity? An analysis of publication trends by income level in the DOAJ 1987 to 2000. Learned Publishing. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1543

Heidbach, K., Knaus, J., Laut, I., & Palzenberger, M. (2022). Long term global trends in open access: A data paper. Max Planck Digital Library. https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3361428_3/component/file_3361648/content
Legge, M. (2024). (In)equity in open access: OASPA's recommended practices on financial and workflow barriers. https://zenodo.org/records/14261488

Further Reading

Developing a healthy and diverse “OA market,” OASPA resources:

1. May 2021: https://www.oaspa.org/news/developing-a-healthy-and-diverse-oa-market/
2. September 2021: https://www.oaspa.org/resources/developing-a-healthy-and-diverse-oa-market-reflections/
3. January 2023: https://www.oaspa.org/news/the-oa-market-what-is-healthy-part-1/
4. January 2023: https://www.oaspa.org/news/the-oa-market-what-is-healthy-part-2/

OASPA’s Equity in Open Access workshop series, March to September 2023:

1. The APC debate, rainbows and reflections (based on workshop #1)
2. Why do professors pick paywalls? (based on workshop #2)
3. Making waves in APC & waiver practice (based on workshop #3)
4. Money flows and trust signals in OA for all (Part 1 based on workshop #4)
5. Trust as the new prestige (Part 2 based on workshop #4)