New OASPA Position Paper: “Embracing the Complexity of ‘100% OA’: From Percentage to Participation”

From OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association):

Over the course of 2025, OASPA announced our ‘Next 50%’ project, then released and conducted a survey in conjunction with our project primer and ran three online workshops on the ‘different conversation’ about open access that our project primer outlined.

Data and inputs from these activities (see links at the end of this post) fed into an interactive feedback session held at the in-person OASPA2025 conference in Leuven. Input was also collected via a poll that remained open for all attendees over the three days of our conference.

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The culmination of all this work is a new position paper from OASPA. This final output from our 2025 project conveys how success in delivering open access for more than 50% of research articles (the inspiration for naming our ‘Next 50%’ project) reveals the limitations of what is, for many, today’s business-as-usual.

The  2025 position paper from OASPA officially expands our focus from the percentage of open access outputs published to also enabling participation in an open, scholarly exchange.

This shift in imperative is described over the eight pages of our position paper where we summarise the five biggest problems in open access:

• inequitable models
• lack of funding
• excessive focus on research articles
• commodification of outputs
• lack of coordination

Additionally we explore how three interlocking barriers (geographic and economic exclusion; linguistic hegemony; disciplinary fragmentation) limit participation and reveal a scholarly publishing system that has been optimised for scale, efficiency and standardisation – rather than diversity, inclusion and contextual relevance.

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Filed under: Data Files, Funding, Journal Articles, News, Open Access, Publishing