Co-creating a healthy and diverse open access market

"OASPA’s mission is to ‘develop and disseminate solutions that advance open access and ensure a diverse, vibrant, and healthy open access community’. These twin goals of advancing open access (OA) and ensuring a healthy OA community are distinct and not necessarily synergistic. Strategies aimed at rapidly increasing the proportion of OA content may prove damaging to the community over the long-term if they lead to higher costs or increase levels of market concentration. Meanwhile, a diverse and vibrant OA community will fail to meaningfully advance OA if it cannot offer credible, mainstream alternatives to paywalled publication.

We can state with confidence that open access is advancing rapidly. OASPA members published 425,000 articles in 2019, a 17% increase on 2018. The number of articles reported by our members has grown almost ten-fold since 2011 (Pollock 2020). This picture is consistent with the wider landscape, with sustained double-digit growth in open access articles far outstripping growth in the underlying scholarly journals market (Pollock and Michael, 2020). Though progress towards open access books and other outputs remains slow, a growing number of studies suggest we have already passed the ‘tipping point’ for open availability of peer-reviewed journal articles (European Commission 2013; Piwowar et al 2019; Hook 2021).

The prospects for a diverse, vibrant and healthy OA community appear less rosy. Today, just six publishers account for around 75% of OASPA members’ OA output (Pollock 2020), and market concentration is increasing rapidly in the wider OA market, as Section 3 of this issue brief shows. There are also legitimate concerns that future models of open access publishing may exclude authors from low- and middle-income countries. As Richard Poynder (2020) has observed, ‘one possible outcome [of the OA movement] is that greater accessibility will be achieved at the cost of both affordability and equity.’ 

It is for this reason that OASPA has convened two workshops on the open access market with representatives from multiple stakeholders and regions. As a community, we need to assess the roles of different actors in shaping the open access market, recognising that governments and funders are increasingly active in shaping systems of scholarly communication. But most importantly, we want to bring together private, public and community-led stakeholders to identify the influential factors and drivers that can be used to bring about positive change."