The State of Open Access in 18 Statements

"The major question associated with open access is no longer whether OA should be at the centre of the mainstream scholarly communication system, but how? The key challenges are now about how to make OA work, not whether it should happen at all. That was the conclusion I came to following a large-scale analysis of the OA discourse from the last five years. In that time, we seem to have moved from a position of ‘whether’ to one of ‘how.’  I looked at the peer-reviewed literature on OA and also at relevant reports, press articles and ‘informal’ communication channels (blogs, email discussion lists etc) which together make up the OA discourse. I used a textual analysis tool (VOSviewer) to visualise important terms from 589 key articles on OA identified from peer-reviewed journals (a corpus of over 2.5 million words). I then used the output from VOSviewer to identify major themes which could then be explored further both in the peer-reviewed literature and other sources ..."