In 2023 OASPA carried out a strategic review and developed the first formal strategic plan that we have worked to. Implemented at the start of 2024, we are now one year in, and so the start of 2025 has provided a good opportunity to assess progress.
Supporting diverse approaches to OA
We are very proud of the breadth of our membership. Last year OASPA welcomed 30 new members from 19 countries across 5 continents. This year we have already added 9 new members. As previously reported, we offer significant support to applicants around our criteria and best practices in open access publishing. Our member review processes remain detailed and in-depth.
We now have over 260 members and supporters in total, a number which continues to grow year-on-year, covering a diverse range of publishing organisations, infrastructures, service providers and others connected with open access – each is unique and enriches the OASPA network.
OASPA continues to provide a focal point and network for open access publishing, as well as providing a quality signal via its members. As an organisation we will continue to promote best practice and ethical standards in open access publishing, whilst showcasing innovation, and the diverse models and policies that support open access publishing today.
In the middle of last year we appointed a Community Engagement Manager to enable OASPA to dedicate more time for direct contact with our members. We held a dedicated session for members at our in-person conference (September 2024), an online member forum via our Annual General Meeting (November 2024), and a member feedback session on our Equity in OA work (January 2025), all of which have highlighted important things for us to take forward.
It’s important to OASPA that discussions reflect the diversity and reality of open access, and that all who are engaged in open access publishing have opportunities to hear the full breadth of perspectives. OASPA remains uniquely dedicated to focusing on all forms of OA and OA publishing organisations. We connect and highlight the work of all professionals whose primary focus and practice is open access publishing.
A clear vision
Our vision for the future of open access focusses on 3 areas:
- An open access future where there is equitable participation in open scholarly communication
- Meeting the needs of the global research community with a diverse range of publishing options and infrastructures
- Supporting the whole ecosystem through reliable information, and transparent behaviours and practices
In addressing the first of these, over the past year we announced our program of work to look at measures to address inequity in scholarly publishing. We undertook the challenge of coordinating broad community input to develop recommended practices on financial and workflow barriers as first steps.
To support the recommendations, a series of ‘Wayfinders’ events were launched in 2024. With the aim of highlighting examples of those increasing equity in OA in different ways, four webinars were held focussing on different approaches in 2024. The recommendations are further supported by a living list of examples which will be added to.
There were three panels on the theme of equity in open access at the in-person OASPA conference in September, and in October 2024 OASPA co-organised an event focussing on open access books in East Africa, in collaboration with OAPEN, DOAB and French research institutes in Africa supported by the CNRS.
In terms of equitable participation in our own events, 10% of our attendees to 2024 in-person and online events were from underrepresented and under-resourced organisations, with a bigger proportion taking part in our online seminars. We cover costs for participants in our in-person conference with financial support from Wellcome, however we recognise we have more to do in this area.
Priorities and focus in the year ahead
Our next steps will be to refocus on our mission to enable open access as the predominant model for communication of scholarly outputs, building on the central point of a keynote speech on “Supporting multiple routes to open access” delivered by Maurice York (Big Ten Academic Alliance) at OASPA’s annual conference in September 2024.
We have continued to collect publication data to observe the trends in OA publishing outputs. This year the data delivered a surprising headline as we observed that within our dataset, although OA output grew overall, fully OA journals output shrank in 2023, while hybrid OA made up the lost ground. In our previous post we had already noted that growth had slowed somewhat, despite overall output totals remaining high. We’re keen to see what our next dataset will show us as it will also help to inform our next steps.
Given that we may have only achieved ‘the easy part’ in the past two decades, and as the majority of feedback on our equity in OA work from members requests connection and convening, OASPA will be leading a program of work in 2025 that brings stakeholders together to examine what it will take to deliver the full transition to open access, and what support is needed to expedite progress.
For this we envision a series of workshops that will explore what the next generation of open access agreements might look like to enable a fully open access and fully inclusive ecosystem. These will bring together publishing organisations with those who pay for, fund and invest in both research and publishing services – i.e. funders, libraries and their consortia. It will consider the broader picture of funding across institutions and research funders, and provide a collaborative forum for discussion around, and evolution of, open access funding and open access negotiations. This will build on and underline our ambitious goal of enabling open access for all scholars, without exception, as the headline aim of our recommendations.
Other key activities
We continue to be involved in other ways to support OA publishing, such as developing the OA Journals Toolkit with DOAJ. Supported by an external editorial board, the toolkit is now available in 5 languages and the content will be expanded this year.
2025 will be the final year of our participation in the European Commission-funded DIAMAS project, however it brings the launch of the new ALMASI project, to which OASPA contributes specific expertise of quality assurance in open access publishing.
We will also continue collaborating with allied organisations, including working on the committees for Think. Check. Submit., C4DISC, the OA books author toolkit, and providing ongoing support for OA Switchboard.
Following the success of our 2024 conference which saw us return to an in-person setting, we’ll be back 22-24 September for our 2025 conference, this time in beautiful Leuven. Details about how to register will be available soon. Watch this space!
We will of course continue our fantastic series of online events which remain freely available for all to join. Our next webinar on Thursday this week will discuss Practical Applications of Open Infrastructure Tools for Scholarly Communication, and the Wayfinders series continues to take a deep dive into different approaches achieving more equitable open access; Wayfinders #5 on 25 March 2025 will highlight and discuss collective models for open books.
Organisational stability
OASPA is a stichting which is a non-profit, mission-driven foundation based in the Netherlands. OASPA is governed by an international board of directors and has a staff team which combined is the equivalent of 4.5 FTEs.
As well as our strategic review and our support of members and the trajectory of OA as a whole, we want to ensure that OASPA functions as efficiently and effectively as possible. In 2024 we reviewed OASPA’s governance model and proposed some amendments to the Articles of Association which were approved by the membership at the AGM at the end of last year. Importantly, these changes allow the Board to take a more supervisory role and enable the staff to focus on operations, bringing a clearer distinction of the responsibilities, supported by defined processes and procedures.
We look forward to the year ahead and hope to work closely with those in our community in support of our mission. Do get in touch if you have feedback, questions or thoughts about our work, or the trajectory of open access in scholarly communications. And if you have an idea for a future webinar topic you would like us to consider, we invite you to send us your ideas via this form.