From niche model to publishing standard - Research Information

"When I first stepped into the world of open access (OA) publishing the landscape looked very different.  I was one of the early employees at the new ‘startup’ BioMed Central (BMC) (the first commercial OA publisher) in the early 2000’s, and at that time, OA was very much a fringe concept.

While OA has a longer history than 25 years – the first major OA repository for preprints was launched in 1991 (arXiv) – in the early 2000’s OA was still a model very much in its infancy and we spent a lot of time explaining what it was, advocating for its value, and building awareness. Whilst people ‘got’ the ethos of OA and the benefits for researchers/ research, it was met with scepticism. Was it vanity publishing? Could OA be scalable, could it be trusted? 

I still remember to this day the whiteboard we had in the office where we would track article submissions – reaching 30 felt like such a milestone! The growth in OA and awareness started to change in the early 2000s with initiatives such as The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) which formally defined OA and called for global action and The Bethesda Statement and Berlin Declaration which further solidified OA principles and in 2005 when the Wellcome Trust introduced its OA policy with funding. Support for the new model still took a while.

In 2004, globally the percentage of OA articles was under 4% (31,486 OA articles) of research output for that year, and now the market is at around 50% (48.1%) with around 1.4million+ OA papers published in 2024 – a milestone that reflects not just a shift in publishing models, but a transformation in how the world values and shares research. For me, this isn’t just a statistic. It’s a moment to reflect on the journey, the progress we’ve made – as a community – and the work still ahead...."