Each year, Delta Think’s OA Market Sizing analyzes the value of the open access journals market. This is the revenue generated by providers or the costs incurred by buyers of content. We have seen two strong years of growth in the wake of COVID-19, as well as a shift in publishers’ focus in the wake of Plan S and exchange rate effects. Together these have compounded OA’s underlying strong growth and suggest a systemic acceleration in the growth of OA which we are now able to observe. We estimate the OA market to have accelerated ahead of our previous expectations, to around $1.6bn in 2021, growing to over $2bn in 2024 if current trends continue.
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Publishers have been increasingly focused on OA in the wake of Plan S. The recent OSTP policy announcement is likely to accelerate OA further.
The large corporates have seen very strong growth in OA activity. This will serve to accelerate the growth in the value of OA: the large publishers are able to harness economies of scale and resulting efficiencies to maximize revenue.
OA output in hybrid journals continues to be boosted more than other OA output.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
