Open Access 2018 Outlook | Dan Pollock

"As we go into 2018, it is interesting to reflect on continued developments in the open access landscape. The open access market manages to be both dynamic and slow moving at the same time.

The open access market Itself will continue to grow – we estimate by 15-20% over 2017 – to be in excess of $500m in 2018. This is outstripping the underlying STM publishing market’s growth of low single digit percent per year.

Green open access has not proven to be the big disruptor that the idealists had hoped for. It is either tucked into the subscription model via embargos, or safely contained as a complement to existing workflows by license limitations to pre-prints.

Gold open access remains the mainstay the market, levied mostly via the corresponding author, and paid by funders or institutions. Sponsorships, discounting schemes, and bundling with subscription deals add further complexity. Assuming that the transition costs are now largely sunk, ongoing open access revenues will translate directly into incremental margin.

Public access has seemingly satisfied policy makers in the US, even though the absence of full permission licenses means that this is not “pure” open access.

Dynamics within the market. The transitional phase is proving to be the end state....

Conclusion. The open access market is nuanced, growing well, but taking share slowly. Existing market structures have not merely adopted open access but, large incumbents especially, are using it to further consolidate their position, leveraging their market dominance via big deals and offsetting arrangements. The transition phase involving hybrid appears to be the new normal. Now that most of the large players have completed the addition of open access options to their portfolios, and so transition costs are effectively sunk, expansion of hybrid open access uptake could represent significant incremental margin for them going forward.

The flip to a fully open access world appears to be a distant prospect, and so the narrative amongst its advocates is a mixture of encouragement at the initial progress towards open access, but frustration at its apparent failure to change existing market structures to a more “functional” market.

We would argue the contrary: the market seems to be reflecting the appetite of its consumers. Authors are much more concerned about Impact Factor than price, institutions pursue fragmented rather than collective bargaining, and funders appear satisfied with the status quo, so the culture of scholarship itself is now the biggest inhibitor of further change."