Category Archives: Open Access

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.

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.

International Open Access Week returns this year, from October 21st – October 27th. The theme is once again “Community over Commercialization.” Open Access as a mode of publishing is more successful than ever. According to the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, in the last ten years, the share of publications available only to subscribers has fallen from 70% to 52%, meaning many more people are able to read scholarship at no cost.

But within that success is also a story of commercialization. Gold OA, where the author or research funder pays the Article Processing Charge, has more than tripled as a percentage of publishing, while Green OA, which is a version of open publishing that does not cost extra, is now half of what it was. With APCs averaging nearly $1,400, and large publishers like Elsevier averaging $2,100 for Gold OA, and $3,440 for publishing Open Access in a hybrid journal, Open Access is coming at quite a cost.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration, one of the guiding documents of the Open Access movement, was issued in 2002, at a time when print still dominated scholarly publishing. One of its big ideas is that the move to the Internet for publishing would make it much cheaper. This has not proven to be the case. As we enter this Open Access Week, it is a time to reflect on how we can better balance the need to compensate all parts of the scholarly communications ecosystem for the work they do, while keeping the dissemination of knowledge and the betterment of society as the goal we hope to achieve.

This year at the Boston College Libraries, we have put together a display on the third floor lobby of O’Neill and in the Theology and Ministry Library, highlighting works from our collection having to do with access to scholarly materials and the push for open models. Boston College Libraries also publish a number of undergraduate journals, and will be holding an editors forum October 24th at 3pm where editors can learn how to use tools like OJS and Tableau to help kickstart a new publication or highlight journal statistics. To find out more about the movement toward fuller open access, check out Peter Suber’s book on the subject, Open Access, which is available in print – and also fully free online, (an open access version!)

Recently, the staff of the Theology and Ministry Library added a new permanent display to its current periodical reading area promoting the discovery of open-access publications.  They made the new addition to both highlight the importance of this form of publishing and to support the particular research needs of the students of the Clough School of Theology and Ministry (CSTM).  Many key international publications in theology are now being made available open-access, and this helps students from the CSTM, 32% of whom are international and from 24 different countries.  To complement the physical display, the staff also created an online guide to provide direct links to publications.

While open access publishing is gaining popularity in the United States, global developments in adopting open access policies and building infrastructure generally outpace the rate of developments in the United States. Of course, it is not a competition, and learning about open access publications and presses from all over the world will help contribute to a more thoroughly connected, diverse, and complete scholarly record. In recent decades, different organizations are working to consolidate different open access policies, publications statistics, and trends in one place or dashboard.

One of these is the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, which has compiled statistics on open access output by country and by institution. And while the United States has the highest quantity of open publications between 2000 and 2024 at 7,269,454, this represents only 44% of total domestic publications – while countries like Indonesia (1,487,632 total open access pubs) and Peru (97,881 open pubs) publish 91% and 82% open access, respectively. Dashboards and initiatives like these help to track progress – or comparative lack of progress, over the years as it relates to the actual publication of open materials. Studying the examples of countries that have quickly transitioned to producing a much higher percentage of open access publications is an important part of the work of open access advocates.

Another excellent tool for the tracking of open access projects is OpenAPC, which attempts to track where Article Processing Charges (APCs) are being paid from and which publishers are being paid. While the project does not have enough data from the United States institutions to suggest any sort of narrative domestically, many European (especially German) institutions have contributed data to the project – and the site is very useful at understanding all the differing pieces that make open access publishing work across the world.

The top funder of APCs in OpenAPC, rather unsurprisingly, is listed as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Having contributed over 31 million euro in APCs, the foundation alone has funded over 7% of all APCs on the site itself – and that is just what IS recorded by OpenAPC. The site also usefully tracks to increased prevalence of Transformative Agreements and expenditure on processing charges for open access monographs.

While the landscape around open access changes rapidly depending on the discipline, country, and institutional attitude, having a sense of what policies exist and what publications can supplement or compliment collections with low cost can help open access advocates and librarians fight for more equitable access for our students.