Open Access: Maintaining the Momentum
Catch up with a timely discussion on the future of open access: While the movement has seen remarkable growth over the past decade, recent financial, political, and global challenges are threatening its progress. How can we keep the momentum going?
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The tenth De Gruyter Brill webinar in the series “Challenging the Status Quo: Taking Libraries into the Future” took place on Thursday June 5th. It set out to explore ways in which the exponential progress achieved by open access, particularly in the past ten years, can be maintained and built on in the face of the international, national and local difficulties now facing librarians and universities across the globe. The speakers were Niels Stern, Managing Director of the OAPEN foundation and co-Director of DOAB, and Dominic Mitchell, Deputy Director and Platform Manager at DOAJ and Chair of the Board of Directors for OASPA – each distinguished leaders of the open access (OA) movement.
Both speakers reaffirmed the philosophy underpinning OA and stressed the importance of its role in enabling the freedom to publish – regardless of nationality, creed, or personal/financial circumstances – during a period when censorship, even by some western entities, is becoming troublingly commonplace.
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Niels referred to Autocracy Inc, by Anne Appelbaum, which throws some disturbing light on the motivation of dictators: “Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or – following in the footsteps of their predecessors – even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.” Dominic said that open access is a vital ingredient of the antidote to misinformation and distrust: “Transparency and openness are bridges between islands of global disparate actors, creating one strong, interconnected, transparent and diverse research ecosphere.”
Niels said that trust takes a long time to build and can quickly be destroyed; and that between 2005 and 2018, that the share of not-free countries increased from 23 to 26 per cent, while the share of free countries declined from 46 to 44 per cent is a sobering fact. DOAJ and DOAB – and organizations like them – are at the forefront of promoting freedom to write and be published.
Niels said that empowerment is therefore the first attribute that open access brings, closely followed by the evaluation and curation of quality content. To achieve these things, collaboration with librarians and publishers is essential.
OA also brings many primary local benefits to libraries, publishers and funders. Among the ones he listed were: discoverability, findability and availability; peer-reviewed books to shelves for free via not-for-profit open infrastructures; adherence to POSI (the set of guidelines for open scholarly infrastructure providers); observation of MEMO (the slice of the collection fitting user needs); and the reuse of material into syllabi and reading lists (thus saving money).
There are also secondary benefits, including perpetual access to OA books. OA makes book banning both inefficient and impossible: OA books can’t be burned or removed from shelves – they proliferate by being downloaded and shared and spread. OA therefore prevents Berufsverbot (professional banning).
Dominic acknowledged that open access has some way to go yet, and also that some of the infrastructures built to enable OA have resulted in unfortunate, unforeseen consequences. He quoted some of the findings presented at the OASPA Conference in Lisbon in 2024. The world is 50% of the way to achieving open access as the default mode of publishing; transformative journals and agreements have failed to transform; Green OA is necessary but still too complicated for authors to engage with; and APC-based open access is creating inequalities.
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However, he strongly disagreed with one of the original premises of the webinar, that commitment to open access is flagging. He demonstrated that the number of applications DOAJ received in 2024 was greater than in any year except 2021. The DOAJ website now attracts an average of 1.6 million users and 3 million page-views each month. New ways of accessing research are being explored, particularly through the deployment of AI tools. DOAJ maintains momentum by being a community-owned, open infrastructure. This is important to the global research community, and particularly to academic libraries and research centres. 73 per cent of its support comes from academic institutions, and although library budgets are being cut, there is a growing trend for libraries to switch funds from subscription budgets to paying for open infrastructures. Finally, DOAJ keeps stakeholders focused by upholding its commitment to openness and transparency; being committed to raising the impact and visibility of quality open access content; promising to ensure all journals metadata is up to date; and committing to maintaining all its metadata services are open to all. It also raises standards by promoting its OA journals toolkit. OAPEN has worked closely with DOAJ to create a similar toolkit for OA books.
The Q&A session which followed these presentations continued until the webinar was out of time. To access the recorded part of the debate, please click on the link supplied at the end of this post. Niels and Dominic kindly offered to send emailed replies to the questions that could not be covered in the live session. For the many people who expressed interest, additional questions and the speakers’ replies have been appended to the recording.
We would like to thank Niels Stern and Dominic Mitchell for their stellar presentations and for contributing to one of the most successful webinars of this series.
You can find the recording of “Open Access: Maintaining the Momentum” here.
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