The rise of China and the fall of open access
peter.suber's bookmarks 2025-10-26
Summary:
"The proportion of research articles published under the Gold model has fallen in 2025, compared with 2024, but the proportion of hybrid articles has increased slightly.
It’s worth noting that the proportion of Closed articles in 2025 is similar to 2024. The steady transition to open access, which ran through to 2023, appears to have stalled and perhaps even reversed if “Gold” is the ultimate goal....
The rapid growth of research article output from China is affecting the global transition to open access; Chinese researchers rarely publish open access in hybrid journals — presumably due to a lack of transformative agreements — preferring fully open access journals (occasionally) or subscription journals (often).
It’s worth noting that 60% of research articles that have at least one author from China are Closed access (Figure 5; above). By contrast only a third of articles that do not have any authors from China are published in Closed journals (Figure 6; below)....
China will need to adopt transformative agreements at scale for hybrid open access to increase significantly, globally. China’s market dominance in terms of article output is simply too large for it to be otherwise."