Responsibility and sustainability in the Open Access movement | Clarivate Analytics

"Both librarians and government organizations have already taken big steps to increase the sustainability of OA, but there are still questions to be answered.

Herold says the reason OA is becoming a sustainable movement is because the government mandates that government-funded research be put in institutional repositories. The National Institutes of Health started this with PubMed, but now all federal agencies are in the process of creating repositories. Public-access policies and support from the federal government have turned the tide on OA sustainability.

One issue that touches both sustainability and responsibility, though, is that OA should not result in increasing any barriers to the openness of research. Herold says that article-processing charges can decrease the sustainability of OA in the long run by creating a barrier for researchers who may not be able to afford the cost.

'We have to be cognizant and careful about creating the haves and have nots,' says Herold. 'If we’re making it free on the user end, we don’t want to create barriers on the deposit end.'

When working within a gold OA framework, this could mean having librarians work to lower and help pay article processing charges, although smaller institutions might not be able to do this."