13 November 2025
(From the position paper) “The open access movement has achieved remarkable progress over two decades, reaching over 50% of research articles and conference papers by 2023. Yet we now face a new challenge: growth is slowing, and the remaining transition appears more complex than the progress achieved so far. This position paper acknowledges an uncomfortable tension: any solutions we can hypothesise today feel uncertain because we face problems that operate at different scales, require different types of interventions, and exceed any single organisation’s capacity to solve.
Feedback from OASPA stakeholders has identified key priorities including removing barriers so all scholars worldwide can publish and share openly, enabling open access for every subject area, and enabling scholarly communication between speakers of different languages. These priorities share a fundamental thread: they concern participation and go beyond the long-standing focus on access.
OASPA’s role in this context is not to prescribe solutions, but to create the conditions needed for diverse stakeholders to work through uncertainty together. This requires honesty about what we don’t know, transparency about constraints, experimentation and learning, recognition of diverse and contextually-relevant approaches, and attention to how open access is achieved and who can engage and benefit.”
The new November 2025 position paper from OASPA officially expands focus from the percentage of open access outputs published to also enabling participation in an open, scholarly exchange. This shift in imperative is described alongside a distillation of the five biggest problems in open access and exploration of how three interlocking barriers limit participation – revealing a scholarly publishing system that has been “optimised for scale, efficiency and standardisation – rather than diversity, inclusion and contextual relevance.“. The paper distinguishes system-wide from sector-level challenges, and proposes what OASPA’s own role could be in making progress. The paper is an outcome of an ongoing, multi-stakeholder project on delivering 100% open access, and will feed into OASPA’s next cycle of strategic planning. The authors urge for “honesty about what we don’t know rather than false confidence in prescriptive strategies” and they invite feedback on this work.