Future of Open Access Publishing: Topics from MIT Press’ Recent Report

In November of last year, MIT Press released a report on the potential expected future of open access publishing. The repost stems from a National Science Foundation-funded workshop focusing on the effects of open access policy and how new policy might be created to fully realize the benefits of open access models.

The full sessions are available to view via the presentation from MIT Press. Below is an bulleted list taken from the first slide from Adam Jaffe’s Keynote Presentation; “An Economist’s Provocation” which does well to highlight some of the themes and questions covered in the workshop and report:

Key Research Questions and Potential Trials for Further Exploration

  1. What do journals really do and how much do they improve things?
  2. How does the community use preprint servers? What was the experience during the Covid pandemic in dealing with a wave of uncurated publications?
  3. What is the correlation between what journals and referees do with what universities care about?
  4. If preprints are mandated for dissemination, what models would work for curation and evaluation? How can those preprints be edited, curated, and improved, and how would that be paid for?
  5. What is the potential for AI to play a role in researcher evaluation?
  6. Do these science-focused methods work for the humanities or social sciences?

As more and more publicly funded scientific research is mandated open access, the question remains for scholars in humanities disciplines. While open access policy mandates may not be as prominent in the humanities, the adopting of policies by consortia and universities – as well as the continued creation of growing open publishing infrastructures suggest that interest in open access publishing is still growing in some capacities. But as the push for open access continues well into its second decade and brings in new layers of scholars – it is important to ask, where is the trend in open access leading?

In the “Access and Evolving Business Models” section, the first session discussion point explains that after a decade long strong push toward open access, “publishing is incentivized to shift to a volume-based system, rather than a highly selective process that focuses on quality.” And indeed, it is not hard to understand a landscape in which new, rapidly growing open access publishers feel the need to compete with more established, traditional publishers rolling out new “transformative” options. As the model for open access relies on up-front article processing charges, a financial incentive for open access publishers is volume – and for professors under constant pressure to publish or perish, it is easy to see how the open access could incentivize work with broader standards.

Ultimately, the same questions that nag at the academic are continuing to nag said academic, with or without open access. How much should a university, or a given professor, be spending on research versus instruction? What percentage of resources should be allocated to building stronger consortial networks that can help to bolster collections and force harder negotiations with publishers? What percentage of a collection budget should be spent on journal subscriptions? All of these questions continue to remain at the forefront, and while open access publications can certainly help increase access to discourses and provide important foundational scientific information, it is important to remember that open access publication models are not a silver bullet – simply an alternative model that highlights and problematizes the role major traditional publishing houses are playing in dictating the cost of access to a given discursive conversation, and in so doing determining, in part, the direction and biases of said discourse.

New Federal Agency Public Access Policies

With the end of 2024, some federal agencies released updates to policy in guidance providing more details on their implementation of the Office of Science and Technology Policy Nelson Memo that requires articles based on federal grants to be made available to the public without cost or embargo. The Department of Energy has created a useful tracker for many agency plans.

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health released a new Public Access Policy in December. The new policy requires researchers funded by NIH grants to make the accepted manuscript of a published article available immediately upon publication, eliminating the currently-allowed 12 month embargo. The new policy takes effect for any article submissions accepted after December 31, 2025. This policy was developed in response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy “Nelson” Memo from 2022, which directed all research funding agencies to make funded research immediately available. 

One of the biggest issues around the new policy is the question of cost. NIH asserts that complying with the policy costs researchers nothing, as researchers only have to submit their manuscripts to the government, which is free. Also, no specific licensing requirement is needed – the NIH emphasizes that this is public access, not open access. Compliance may technically be free, but researchers could still face costs. Some publishers do not currently allow articles to be made available without the payment of an article processing charge. Some of these charges are allowable to be covered by grants funds. The NIH will not cover charges from publishers solely to comply with the new policy. Journals must treat all articles the same. The NIH also did not put a specific dollar amount as to what a ‘reasonable’ cost was.

This policy change has been in the works for a while, but was notably announced weeks before a new administration starts. This was released as a “Policy” and not as a regulation; however, it could still be eligible to be rescinded by Congress via the Congressional Review Act, if the Government Accountability Office deems it qualifies as a rule. There is also a question of what happens to the OSTP memo when the new administration takes office.

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation also put its changes in guidance form, including the new language in its Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide. The guide reiterates the point that submitting to the NSF system is free, but that grant recipients can use awards to pay publishers to allow making the Version of Record available, a long way of saying that awards can be used for Article Processing Charges.

Public Domain Day 2025

With the turning of the calendar over to another year, a new subset of canonical (and more obscure!) titles have become available via the Public Domain. Some of the more well known titles entering the public domain this year are Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These three titles were all published in 1929, meaning their 95 year copyright term expired at the drop of midnight on January 1st, 2025.

Additionally, joining some original Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh character sketches that have in the past couple of years entered the public domain – everyone’s favorite spinach-can popping, bicep-flexing sailor, Popeye, will join the public domain as well. And, just as his predecessors before him, it appears he is slated to appear in a number of horror films which have done well to turn classical children’s characters into something else entirely.

Playbill from thecinemaarchives.com

Beyond classic children’s characters and classical works of literature, this year the public domain marks a rather large shift in cinema. While the transition had largely already been made, and indeed, some “talkies” hit the public domain last year, having come out in 1928, it wasn’t until one year later, 1929, that these “talkies” took over as the preeminent form of motion pictures. Alfred Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound film, Blackmail, was released in 1929 and has thus entered the public domain this year. Additionally, Hallelujah, which is the first Hollywood film with an entirely black cast, in now in the public domain as well.

Open Access Books: A Snapshot

As institutions, authors, and publishers have started to accept open access publishing as an alternative model to traditional publishing, open access journals are being published by major publishers and independent houses that may be publishing only one journal. And indeed, as journal editors and authors consider the implications of publishing open access, the question of other publications arises.

More and more universities are attempting to develop Open Educational Resources (OERs) in the face of Inclusive Access, which often puts the burden of costs of learning materials on students without their knowing. Beyond just journals, articles, or dissertations, questions are arising around publishing full books open access.

One organization is helping to pave the way in leading with potential publishing and financial models for creating new OERs and open access books. OAPEN manages both the Directory of Open Access Books as well as the OA Books Toolkit help to contribute to the growing landscape. With a new strategic plan for 2025-2028, the DOAB aspires to the following over the next three years:

  1. Make DOAB known and available to publisher’s globally,
  2. Establish a community of practice for quality assessment of OA books,
  3. Establish DOAB as a trusted source and reference point for institutions and funders in their strategies and policies for OA books,
  4. Make DOAB operationally and financially robust and resilient, and
  5. Bring innovation to the DOAB services and reduce its potential obsolescence.

With a number of smaller objectives making up the more quantifiable aspects of these goals, DOAB’s ability to set itself up as an important access point for researchers and faculty could be an interesting bellwether for the future of open access books in scholarly publishing – and the success and implementation of open educational resources beyond a smattering of excited academics.

OAPEN also offers more resources within their Open Access Books Toolkit, which provides helpful information for authors and policymakers on funding models, licensure best practices, publishing and medium options and more. While appetite for much more affordable resources for research and class syllabi remains, the question will continue to shift; are the new tools and models that it may take to development a more prolific subset of open access networks and publications worth the investment? When large publishing companies are offering more and more competitive options to make sure to secure their subscriptions, who is incentivized to develop open models? Hopefully tools like the OA Books Toolkit and the DOAB will continue to ease the burden of publishing in a less traditional way.

The Librarian of Congress Rules

Carla Hayden has served as the Librarian of Congress since 2016 – picture taken from the Library of Congress official website.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress, with the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, releases a regulation detailing exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. The latest exemptions were released at the end of October.

The DMCA is a complicated law. It bars people from “circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. 17 USC 1201(a)(1)(A). This includes decrypting an encrypted work, but it includes things one does not necessarily think of as encrypted, like a DVD of a movie. This is also independent of the right to use the work; even if something would be fine under fair use, violating the DMCA is a separate problem. The Librarian of Congress issues exceptions where people are allowed to circumvent technical measures. These exemptions are reviewed, and new ones considered, every three years.

This year, we saw almost all of the prior exemptions renewed. For libraries, this included important and often-used exemptions for using short portions of motion pictures for educational purposes, criticism, and comment, and for motion pictures for accessibility and preservation purposes.

The Librarian added to the exemption for text and data mining, allowing researchers at non-profit colleges and universities to access corpora, either of motion pictures or literary works, hosted at other institutions, if certain security thresholds are met. These researchers do not even have to be collaborating with researchers at the host university. I think that we will see institutions hosting corpora for the good of researchers everywhere, although it might take grant funding to bring that to fruition.

Two new exemptions were denied. The Librarian did not expand an exemption for video games, which would allow for more individuals to use copies at a time. She also rejected an exemption for AI models for trustworthiness research. Also of note, there was an exemption added for the software that runs retail ice cream machines, so they will be more repairable.