Market Sizing Update 2025 – Has OA recovered its mojo?

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• Market size: We estimate that the OA market grew to just under $2.4bn in 2024, an increase of 6.9% over the previous year. Although an improvement on the low growth the year before, this is still only one quarter of its historic growth rates.
• Overall journals market: We estimate the total scholarly journals market to have increased by 2.5% in 2024, compared with its long-term low single-digit growth around 5%.
• OA share of output and value: Just under 50% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access, accounting for slightly over 20% of corresponding market value.
• Fully OA publishers: Large, fully open access publishers saw a significant drop in their article output in 2024. The share of fully OA articles shrank slightly, but fully OA share of revenue ticked up. We anticipate both volume and value may begin to recover next year.
• Hybrid OA: Hybrid continues to make up for some of the shrinkage in fully OA output with both hybrid article and revenue growth remaining strong. Slightly higher-priced fully OA options have also likely contributed to fully OA’s increasing revenue.
• Currency effects: Without currency effects, OA market value would have grown by nearly 11%, and the overall journals market by 7.5%. This suggests that underlying growth in the OA market value has recovered since last year, and the overall market grew above long-term trends.
• Future outlook: OA publishing has once again outpaced the broader journals market. From 2024 to 2027, we anticipate a CAGR (average growth each year) of 7.7% in OA output and 12% in OA market value-- roughly double last year’s projections, though still just below long-term averages."