The journey so far
Over the course of 2025, OASPA announced our ‘Next 50%’ project, then released and conducted a survey in conjunction with our project primer and ran three online workshops on the ‘different conversation’ about open access that our project primer outlined.
Data and inputs from these activities (see links at the end of this post) fed into an interactive feedback session held at the in-person OASPA2025 conference in Leuven. Input was also collected via a poll that remained open for all attendees over the three days of our conference.
Our position paper
The culmination of all this work is a new position paper from OASPA. This final output from our 2025 project conveys how success in delivering open access for more than 50% of research articles (the inspiration for naming our ‘Next 50%’ project) reveals the limitations of what is, for many, today’s business-as-usual.
OASPA has always been an organisation that promotes open access as the predominant mode for scholarly publishing. Based on survey responses, workshop conversations, as well as in-person and poll-based feedback at our 2025 conference – we are now compelled to lift our gaze.
The above November 2025 position paper from OASPA officially expands our focus from the percentage of open access outputs published to also enabling participation in an open, scholarly exchange.
This shift in imperative is described over the eight pages of our position paper where we summarise the five biggest problems in open access:
- inequitable models
- lack of funding
- excessive focus on research articles
- commodification of outputs
- lack of coordination
Additionally we explore how three interlocking barriers (geographic and economic exclusion; linguistic hegemony; disciplinary fragmentation) limit participation and reveal a scholarly publishing system that has been optimised for scale, efficiency and standardisation – rather than diversity, inclusion and contextual relevance.
Our work distinguishes challenges at the system level (e.g. reforming research evaluation frameworks) from sector level issues (e.g. enabling multilingual outputs). This is followed by a section on why solutions remain uncertain and how we can move from aspiration to action.
With this, we emphasise the importance of honesty about what we don’t know – rather than false confidence in prescriptive strategies.
The issues we outline urgently need coordinated action, but this only works if all stakeholders take responsibility – meaning that we at OASPA also have our role to play. We therefore conclude with short, medium and long-term goals for OASPA. These ambitions – ranging from us continuing to convene diverse stakeholders, to the sector making demonstrable progress on participatory openness metrics – will inform the next phase of OASPA’s strategic planning in 2026.
We are indebted to Andrea Chiarelli, Katie Fraser and Rob Johnson of Research Consulting. They have been helpful partners throughout what was initially titled the ‘Next 50%’ project, but is now embracing the complexity of ‘100% OA’ – from percentage to participation.
Send us your reactions
Do you think we outline the right aims for the system, the sector and for ourselves? Please help guide our next steps by sharing your reactions – positive or not – via the text-box in this feedback form. You can also email malavika.legge@oaspa.org to share your thoughts.
Further reading – activities and outputs leading to our November 2025 position paper:
– OASPA’s announcement of the ‘Next 50%’ project (April 2025)
– Project primer – Setting the stage for a ‘different conversation’ about open access (May 2025)
– Release of survey (May 2025)
– Update from three ‘Next 50%’ multistakeholder workshops (June 2025)