Developing a Healthy and Diverse OA Market | OASPA

For OASPA, having a healthy and diverse publishing market is integral to our mission. We want to promote the development of diverse systems, business models and policies that support OA publishing and encourage a healthy and diverse market for pure OA publishing in the longer term.

In order to shape our goals in this area, we recognised that we need to develop a better understanding of ‘the open access market’. We need to assess the roles of different actors in shaping this market, including researchers, public, private and not-for-profit entities. We also need to acknowledge that in many disciplines and regions of the world open access publishing is not delivered through market mechanisms at all. Finally, we need to identify the influential factors and drivers that can bring about positive change, or are doing so already. 

We’ve therefore commissioned Research Consulting to work with a small steering group of OASPA members to develop our approach to this area, and will be engaging with a wide range of stakeholders on this topic over the next few months. 

Emerging definitions

We have developed a working definition of ‘the open access market’ as follows: ‘the economic system that enables the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other access barriers, and with minimal restrictions on re-use’. 

A healthy open access market can then be defined as one where publishing services are underpinned by stable and scalable revenues, where authors (and libraries acting on their behalf) can publish their research open access either free of charge or at an affordable price and readers are able to access journal articles free of charge and with minimal restrictions on re-use. Collectively, the market must enable efficient and high-quality dissemination of scientific information. 

Diversity is also an essential characteristic of an optimal scholarly communications system. A diverse open access market is one that successfully accommodates different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics in order to support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities.

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