2021
Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA)
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Open access publishing refers to a set of principles and practices through which peer-reviewed research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a diverse community of organisations engaged in encouraging and enabling open access as the predominant model of communication for scholarly outputs.
Open access is advancing rapidly – OASPA members (in 2019) published 425,000 articles – a 17% increase on the previous year. It has been reported that the number of articles has grown almost ten-fold since 2011.
But what makes for a healthy and diverse open access market? Today, just six publishers account for around 75% of OASPA members’ open access output. Market concentration is increasing rapidly in the wider open access market and there are concerns that future models of open access publishing may exclude authors from low and middle-income countries. It could be that greater accessibility is eventually achieved at the cost of both affordability and equity.
In response to these concerns, OASPA and Research Consulting worked together on an issue brief and convened two workshops in July 2021 to discuss and analyse the open access market. The workshops each ran over three hours, and were scheduled to cover multiple time zones, with the aim of capturing global perspectives. The workshop centred around discussions on the role of the market, regulation and the community in co-creating a healthy and diverse OA market.
Invited stakeholders included academics, funders, publishers, advocacy bodies, infrastructure and service providers, research performing organisations and libraries. In total, 31 stakeholder representatives attended the workshops.
The workshops were successful in generating a range of views from the diverse groups represented. Whilst they concluded that there were no easy solutions to this issue, they identified three key areas that could be built into OASPA’s future program of work:
1. Strengthening community representation in the governance of publishing services and infrastructure.
2. Developing norms and standards for responsible behaviour in the OA marketplace.
3. Supporting efforts to transform researcher assessment and evaluation mechanisms.
The outcomes of our work were shared widely through an issue brief, workshop report and at the 2021 OASPA conference.
The expertise the Research Consulting team brought on the subject matter helped us shape our ideas and contributed to really meaningful planning sessions, but also was of such value in the preparation of written materials and documentation – that knowledge was always delivered in an unbiased and thoughtful way and is truly appreciated. Thank you!Claire Redhead, Director at OASPA
