How OA2020 is Advancing the Transition to Open Access | Katina Magazine

"it’s important to recall the landscape when OA2020 launched in 2016. For nearly 15 years, the research community had pursued two main pathways to open access: creating new fully OA journals and encouraging the deposit of some version of the article manuscript in an institutional repository. But neither approach had succeeded in significantly challenging the dominance of subscription paywalls. While there were notable successes in promoting repository deposit and launching fully open access journals—efforts that remain important and should be celebrated—subscription-based publishing continued to account for around 80 percent of newly published articles and the majority of library budgets. To make matters worse, the Finch Report had legitimized hybrid APCs as an added fee, funneling even more money into subscription-based journals through financial flows outside of institutional or library oversight.

Against this backdrop of unchecked double-dipping and, ultimately, progress that left the root problem intact, it was time to take a different approach—to “follow the money.” The 2015 MPDL White Paper demonstrated that the global library spend on subscriptions was already sufficient to fund the majority of scholarly publishing under an open access model. It also outlined a pragmatic framework for repurposing those existing investments: redirecting subscription spending to support open access publishing.

What OA2020 ultimately achieved was proof of concept: libraries and consortia adopted its approach, successfully transforming their subscription deals into open publishing agreements. In doing so, they enabled large swaths of their institutions’ research output to transition from closed to open, often within just a few years—as clearly illustrated in the ESAC Market Watch. By meeting authors where they were already publishing and working within existing library budget structures that supported those journals, OA2020 provided a scalable, effective boost to the global open access movement...."