WHAT’S NEXT FOR OPEN ACCESS?

Answers from Industry Expert Deni Auclair, Outsell, Inc.

To map out the road ahead, Deni Auclair, Vice President and Lead Science and Technology Analyst for the research and advisory firm Outsell, shares insights from her recent research on the open access (OA) market.

The change underway in scholarly publishing has been fast and furious.

OA isn’t new, but you need to be ready for what lies around the next corner.

The trend has moved from whether to adopt open access models to how best to implement them.

OA titles make up just under 5% of the $7 billion journals marketplace, yet OA titles attract an outsize share of media attention and industry conversation.

OA has sparked the rise of the mega-journal:

• Articlesfromvaryingdisciplinesin one publication

• Lowerselectivity

• Speedierpeerreview

The revenue from OA-only journals

grew about 35% between 2013 and 2014.

The number of OA-only journals

grew by 14% during the same time period.

Funding agencies have been directed to support public access to federally funded research, yet few OA mandates exist.

Whether that’s because funders feel they don’t know enough about the market to issue informed and practical mandates, or because governments and not-for-profits just move slowly, the fact is they’re taking years to be issued, let alone refined. – Deni Auclair, Outsell, Inc.

Where mandates exist, there are often conflicts.

If there are multiple funderson a research project and the results are published, for example, which funder’s mandates should prevail?

Authors and institutions find this situation confusing, and it’s likely to continue for the next several years.

Multiple startups, services, and tools are entering the market to address the issue of funder mandates and meet other challenges raised by OA.

For example, Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink functionality gives publishers a turnkey solution for transacting, recording, and reporting on open-access Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Other tools entering the market include:

• Datavisualization• Collaborativeauthoring• Authorpromotion• Article-levelmetrics• Standardizedmeta-data

This shift shows OA’s power to refocus market emphasis on the author.

Authors today aren’t simply contributors. They’re also customers.

Libraries and institutions now find themselves alongside authors in the customer service pool.

The initial gold rush in OA revenues (47% increase in 2013) is over, but the growth rate will stay at 15% – still significant.

OA is at a saturation point. Next, we’ll see openness spreading throughout the publishing workflow: data sets, supporting materials, and protocols.

There will be minimal increases in APCs because of the inelasticity of payer budgets, but few see any practical alternative to the APC.

To learn more about the OA road ahead, download Outsell’s report, “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”

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