B17 final statement – OA2020

[2025 but otherwise undated.] "Reaffirming those priorities and expanding our focus, we set forth the following objectives to guide the next phase of publisher negotiations toward an open scholarly communication paradigm.

1 Academy control: All pathways to open access make valuable contributions towards ensuring the progress of scholarship, impact for society and academy control over the research literature. We reaffirm that on the pathway of publisher-provided, journal-based scholarly publishing, returning control to the academy means an open publication to which an author retains copyright, accompanied by a CC BY license that allows the academy and the public to most fully benefit from the research. We reject any claim to exclusive rights over research articles and related outputs (data, code, preprint, peer review reports, etc.)

2 Academic use of computational research methods: Computational research methodologies, such as text and data mining (TDM) and artificial intelligence (AI), are integral to modern scholarship. It is scholars, not publishers, who should determine which methodologies best advance their ability to investigate, analyze, and generate new knowledge. Application of a CC BY license ensures that scholarly literature and associated outputs contribute to a globally accessible and robust corpus of knowledge for computational research, allowing the academy to fully harness this potential rather than relinquishing control to commercial entities.

3 Transparency: A rapid transition to open access requires that all stakeholders have full visibility into the data necessary to steward this shift and prepare for a future where financial flows equitably support the needs of authors and the research community. We call on publishers to collaborate with the research community to enable the full opening of research information, as described in the Barcelona Declaration. Only with full transparency around publication data, publication ethics and quality assurance standards, and pricing—including information on waivers, discounts, and the impacts of geopricing—can the global research community assess progress, ensure accountability, and cultivate a fair and sustainable open scholarly publishing ecosystem.

4 Fair investment realignment: We have made significant strides in dismantling the mechanisms that allow publishers to profit multiple times on the same journal content—through opaque subscription pricing, additive payments by libraries and authors (subscriptions and uncontrolled hybrid APCs), and the exploitation of exclusive copyright—but the transition to open access publishing must go further to guarantee that financial resources are directed toward fostering an inclusive and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem, rather than disproportionately feeding publisher profit margins. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that financial barriers never determine who can publish and that investments in scholarly publishing are fair, transparent, and structured to sustain an open and inclusive publishing environment. As institutions shift their financial commitments from subscriptions to open access, publishers must adapt their pricing structures accordingly. In many cases, this means reducing historical revenue levels to achieve a fairer distribution of publishing costs. At the same time, institutions with high research output must have the confidence that their investments reflect the true cost of responsible open access publishing—grounded in transparency and inclusivity rather than entrenched profit expectations."