For many years now, the dominant discourse around the future of scholarly communication has centered on two assumptions:

First, that charging people for access to scholarly products is morally unacceptable, and must be eradicated by means of a global transition to open access (OA).

Second, that this global transition from toll access to OA is inevitable (if not happening as quickly as it should be).

I’m going to push back on both of those assumptions. In the first part of this two-part essay, I’ll address the second; tomorrow, I’ll address the first, offering (in the form of a “modest manifesto”) a very different vision for the future of our global scholarly communication ecosystem.

As for the global transition to OA: it seems to have stalled out. As for its ultimate inevitability: I’m not seeing any evidence for it. On the contrary, what we seem to be seeing is ongoing and robust evidence of a very different transition, which has already happened and which I suspect will remain in place for the foreseeable future: a transition from a scholarly communication ecosystem overwhelmingly dominated by toll access to a much more diverse, hybrid ecosystem in which a variety of open and toll-access models coexist quite comfortably, each model contributing to the system a different set of strengths and weaknesses, none of them perfectly equitable, each solving some problems while creating or perpetuating others.

STM’s recent report on global uptake of open access provides some compelling evidence contrary to the pervasive “inevitability” discourse. Central to that report is this chart:

There are several interesting and revealing data points here. One is the continued rude good health of toll-access publishing, which, following a modest dip in the market share of articles, reviews, and conference papers between 2014 and 2015, has slowly grown its market share over the subsequent decade, growing much more quickly between 2023 and 2024. In 2024, two decades after the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, toll-access articles, reviews, and conference papers still represented the majority of output in these formats.

Another interesting data point is the growing (though perhaps slowing?) dominance of the article processing charge (APC) as the business model that supports production of open articles, reviews, and conference papers during the same period. While Green and Bronze OA publications puttered along for most of the decade at a low but steady simmer and in recent years have begun to fall off, Gold publications have increased strongly and now come close to rivaling the market share of toll-access publications – though again, recent data suggest that toll access may be pulling away. Given the increasingly controversial nature of the APC funding model (which, let’s be honest, is just another manifestation of toll-access publishing), this trend has caused real consternation in the OA advocacy community.

Now obviously, this is only one report based on only one set of data that focuses specifically on articles, reviews, and conference papers. But I’m not aware of any data suggesting that a global shift to OA is underway in any other sector of the publishing marketplace (if such data are out there, please share in the comments). Nor do global trends in publishing policy and practice offer much indication of an impending shift to universal OA. In the US, the only policy momentum is in the direction of public, rather than open, access, and despite a proliferation of institutional OA statements and policies, virtually no American academic institution actually requires its faculty to publish openly. In Europe, cOAlition S keeps retreating from its original, revolutionary goals. China, as yet, has shown little inclination to make open publishing a requirement for its researchers, and India’s recently instituted One Nation One Subscription scheme represents the national institutionalization not of open access, but of hybridity, with the national government both paying subscription fees and underwriting APCs in selected journals.

So does all of this evidence suggest failure on the part of the open access movement? Not if the movement’s goal is the growth and proliferation of open access – in that regard, it’s been a tremendous success. If, on the other hand, the movement’s goal is universal mandatory OA, then it’s hard to see success on the horizon.

But is mandatory and universal OA a goal we should embrace?

I’ll offer some thoughts on that in tomorrow’s post.