On March 15, 2022, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) celebrated its 20th anniversary by releasing four new high-level recommendations—along with detailed sub-recommendations and further elaborations—focusing on community-led open access (OA) and global equity, and addressing key challenges for the coming decade (BOAI 2022).
Over the last decade, Open Access (OA) has gained support among researchers and policymakers, with increasingly vocal advocacy for free online access to scholarly work. While incorporating Open Access policies in Canada reflects a rapidly changing publishing landscape, with the rise of digitalization and the pressing need to broaden access, the barriers to making Open Access a widespread reality are many and complex.
For the past decade or more, a trend has been observed in the scholarly communications ecosystem toward market consolidation, with fewer companies owning increasing shares of the market. A study by Data Think estimated that, in 2021, very large publishers (those with more than 500 journals) accounted for only 0.06% of the publishers in their study but published nearly half—47%—of all articles (Pollock 2022). This increasing market consolidation has raised concerns in the open scholarship community and in the broader academic community.
The 15th annual International Open Access Week ran from October 24–30. This year’s theme was “Open for Climate Justice,” acknowledging that the widespread effects of climate change are experienced differently by different groups of people. One of the ways this injustice manifests is through inequitable levels of access to knowledge and information about climate change, so open access (OA) “can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them” (“Theme” 2022).
In March 2022, Science Europe, cOAlition S, Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS), and the French National Research Agency announced the release of an Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (Ancion et al. 2022). This Action Plan includes recommendations for supporting and expanding the diamond model of open access (OA). Whereas gold OA refers to publications made openly available to read on journals’ websites (often, though not necessarily, supported by article processing charges or APCs) and green OA refers to publications made free to read through deposit in a repository, diamond OA refers to publications that are free for readers and for authors (see “What are the Different Types of Open Access” from Open Access Australasia).
On August 25, 2022, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo called Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Researchand an accompanying media release. This memo, dubbed the Nelson Memo after Alondra Nelson, then acting Director of the OSTP, outlines public access (open access, OA) policy guidance for US federal agencies that fund research and development. Also released in August 2022 was the OSTP report Economic Landscape of Federal Public Access Policy, which examines potential economic effects of making federally funded research open access upon publication.