OASPA 2025: The Who, The How, The Why and The When

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Returning back home to France by train, after a truncated but thoroughly enjoyable visit to Leuven on behalf of Kriyadocs for the OASPA 2025 conference, gives me chance to reflect on the great panel discussions which characterised this year’s event.

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The official theme of the conference was Embracing the Complexity – how do we get to 100% OA? However, the conversations on stage struck me as being as much about the who, the how, the why and the when of open access and, more broadly, open science. This piece covers my personal reflections on the event.

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The who was discussed in the opening keynote panel chaired by Heather Joseph (SPARC), specifically the philosophical and legal questions of who owns open knowledge? Megs Wacha (UN Library, United Nations) opened the discussion making a strong case for open knowledge ownership by all humanity as an inalienable human right.

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There was broad consensus around this principle, although Stefano Bertuzzi (American Society for Microbiology) made the point that there are stakeholders who may – perhaps understandably – regard this research knowledge as an ‘asset’ to be owned, commoditised or at least protected. Stefano outlined his organisation’s mission, as a nonprofit publisher given tax exemption status in the United States, to act as a bridge over the gap between these asset holders and wider society.

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The discussion moved on to the risks and opportunities of AI – inevitably of course! Stefano was the first of several speakers during the event to highlight the risks posed by the shortcomings of GenAI due to its limited capabilities for providing context, attribution and nuance. I enjoyed Charles Watkinson’s (University of Michigan Press) counter from the floor that machine readable text is surely what ‘we’ have all been aspiring towards, enabling AI to deliver new insights at scale. Not everyone on the panel or in the audience agreed!

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The how was covered throughout the conference, including panels on Depressurising publishing discussing how research incentives impact on integrity, and perspectives from a spectrum of OA publishers in Hello from the other side: views from fully open access journals using APCs. I think it’s helpful to review these two panels in unison.

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Incentives drive behaviour, regardless of the context or circumstances. Yensi Flores Bueso (University College Cork and Global Young Academy) showcased research on the lack of global consistency around research assessment criteria, with national or regional biases towards specific categories of either quantitative or qualitative assessment. No one yet seems to be adopting a broad, diverse spectrum of evaluation criteria.

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Hans de Jonge (NWO) reminded the audience that CoARA offers a forum for a growing number of stakeholders to embrace the kind of diverse research assessment criteria which could promote a fair approach to evaluation and help bring a measure of consistency.

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Publishers face real challenges in adapting to meet the disparate conditions and expectations created by these varying incentives. Liying Yang (National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences) confirmed that Chinese researchers are still largely ambivalent towards OA, despite recent initiatives in China. Impact factor is still king. In the Hello from the other side panel, Cecile de Villiers (AOSIS) explained how her organisation has evolved from publishing a single South African journal to now having a portfolio of 60 regional titles with 7,000 annual submissions, achieved by supporting local researchers with a page-based APC model. On this basis, Cecile says that the average APC for an AOSIS journal is around half the global average price.

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Roheena Anand shared the vision at PLOS for a funding and dissemination model based on research objects rather than the traditional static format of the research article. This still seems to be a work in progress at PLOS, but as more technology platforms and publishers embrace full-text XML capabilities at the outset of the submission and peer review workflow, this granular approach to publishing research content such as data, methods etc will gather momentum. I am duty-bound at this point to mention that Kriyadocs is amongst a number of providers taking this approach!

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The question of Gold OA and APCs brings the debate around how to achieve widespread, sustainable open access into sharp focus. Fiona Hutton (eLife) made a strong argument that any scholarly publisher relying on either APCs or philanthropic support for their programme will eventually face an existential crisis.

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My take on this argument is that the APC model will ultimately cannibalise itself, as an ever-increasing volume of content outstrips the ability of authors and funders to pay, and of publishers to balance quality checks with timely publication. And philanthropists will eventually run out of money to support a Diamond OA journal in perpetuity. Does Subscribe to Open provide a viable middle ground? Adoption is growing, but the jury is still out. In a separate panel on Scaling inclusive open access models, Lauren Kane (BioOne) encouraged the community to experiment with and evolve these new approaches to fostering open access.

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Back in the Hello from the other side panel, Stefan Tochev (MDPI) provided a robust counter-argument in favour of APCs. Whilst acknowledging the need for diverse approaches to OA, and showcasing some of his company’s activities in this regard, Stefan argues that APCs have got us to ~50% OA coverage so far, and in his view APCs will be needed to get us to 100%.

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The APC debate brings us to the why of open access. Most stakeholders will agree that the primary reason for fostering OA is to improve – and embed – equity in the publishing and consumption of scholarly research. But OA is also often framed as a business model, measured in numbers. Does having more OA journals, more OA submissions and more published OA content automatically make a publisher a leader in open access and, by extension, a leader in open research? Are the numbers a measure of progress, or an end in themselves? Is it naïve to expect to get to 100% open access without APCs?

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Bernd Pulverer (EMBO) shared his view that ‘some’ OA journals exist solely to demonstrate output and not to be read. This is the inherent risk of a publish-or-perish culture meeting a pay-to-publish business model. The fairness of this assertion probably depends on who you are, where you live, and what your organisation does.

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Finally, we get to the when of open access publishing and the mission to reach 100%. The consensus was that we are not there yet, there is more to do, but progress is encouraging. In a panel discussing publisher perspectives on Complexity and impacts of transitioning from hybrid to 100% open access, Mandy Hill (Cambridge University Press) echoed the recent statement by the Royal Society of Chemistry that a global, one-size-fits-all approach to OA has proved impossible to achieve, with a diversity of regional approaches needed by scholarly publishers to move OA adoption forward.

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Ending this review on an unfortunately pessimistic note, Bernd Pulverer gave the conference a sobering assessment of how GenAI is shortening the timeframe within which scholarly publishers might retain control of how they foster OA and manage integrity risks.

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In his view, we have just *six months* before being unable to cope with research fraud and integrity risks at scale, due to the rapid evolution of GenAI and its nefarious use by bad actors. AI has always been, and will continue to be, an arms race between the responsible scholarly communications community and irresponsible or misguided actors. The solution lies in incentives and sanctions driven by mandates from funders and national policy makers. There is only so much that scholarly publishers can – and should – be expected to do. But we still need to do what we can, and collaboration is key. OASPA deserves huge credit for continuing to champion open access and foster these conversations.