On July 5, 2021, Mikael Laakso from Hanken School of Economics has published a research report on Nordic academic journals, which was funded by the Nordic publications Committee for Humanities and Social Science Periodicals (NOP-HS). According to the press release for this research report, it provides a comprehensive overview of the Nordic scholarly journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), while focusing on journals fulfilling its geographic sampling criteria, such as being based in Nordic countries. This research has derived its primary data from bibliometric information and a web survey conducted during the first half of 2021. This study has encompassed 353 Nordic journals. Representatives of 72 of these journals have provided responses for the the attendant web survey.  Among the more interesting findings of this research report are that 86% of the sampled Nordic journals are published in English (p. 19). Over 50% of Nordic scientific journals are published by professional bodies. 75% of these journals are published in Open Access. Thus, for this journal sample, whereas Open Access publishing cuts across publisher types, such as research universities, scholarly societies and professional publishers, closed access model deployment, e.g., for 75 journals from the sample, is predominantly concentrated (87%) in the hands of professional market players (p. 21). For Nordic journals, the more important funding sources are grant funding, third-party organization support, e.g., by home institutions, volunteer work and membership frameworks (p. 26).

A recent post discussing the expected impact of Open Access policies on the main players in the British publishing market has focused on the global implications of the growth in the Open Access sector for libraries and publishers: https://openresearch.community/posts/gold-open-access-mandates-may-be-associated-with-publisher-revenue-losses-and-library-cost-increases. In this respect, comparisons between absolute output levels in the Open Access sector and the closed access one also suggest that for multiple publishers Open Access has acted not only as the engine of their growth but also, at least partly, that of profitability. Similarly, the comments section elaborates on the game theoretical implications of the options that libraries and publishers are likely to be facing as they weigh their strategies. In this context, it is also notable that in its discussion of Open Access the report by by FTI Consulting (2021, p. 31) incidentally approximates the situation of some global players in the publishing market, such as Elsevier, less than 25% of the output of which can be published in Open Access, which in many cases trails significantly behind the extent of the country-level adoption of Open Access, such as in the United Kingdom: https://www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opinion/oa-should-be-default.

As the utilization of instructional resources, such as textbooks, in Open Access seems to have plateaued in recent years, despite the influence of the pandemic period, barriers to the adoption of Open Access course books in higher education likely persist: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2021/03/18/pandemic-didnt-speed-adoption-open-educational-resources-outlook. More specifically, as Doug Lederman indicates in his recent article in Inside Higher Ed, whereas the use of textbooks has remained relatively stable in the pandemic-stricken academic year 2019-2020, as compared to the previous one, it is the usage of scholarly articles or case studies and other materials that has seen the most significant increases of 9 and 7 percentage points respectively. This, thus, indicates a tendency to retain the existing coursework setups, as the teaching activities have moved online, while article-level and other readings predominantly serve as additional resources that have contributed to enriching the Internet-based teaching practices and learning experience. This dynamics has also likely contributed to negligible changes, 1 percentage point on average, in the use rates of open educational resources (OER), in reflection of the importance of additional curricular materials, continual textbook updates and remaining organizational or other barriers for Open Access textbook adoption levels. 

In this interview, Olaf Ernst, Chief Solutions Officer at Knowledge Unlatched, discusses the launch of Oable in the context of the Open Science movement, the rationale for the development of this Open Access solution, its institutional partners and supporting organizations and what sets it apart in terms of its functionalities, pricing mechanisms and usage scenarios: https://openresearch.community/posts/ku-spotlight-newsletter-issue-2.

While a recent article by Serghio et al. (2021, p. 8) indicates that the growing adoption of Open Access in biomedical sciences has significantly contributed to increasing the degree of conflict-of-interest and funding disclosures with respect to scholarly article publication, this seems to be the case for open data to a significantly smaller extent. In contrast, research protocol registration and code sharing arrangements seem to have made minor inroads only in the publication of biomedical research results. These contrasting results, such as the growth in the share of articles that disclose conflict-of-interest and funding information, e.g., from around 52% and 63% respectively in 2010 to circa 88% and 85% in 2020, as opposed to an increase in data sharing from around 6% in 2010 to approximately 12% in 2020 (Serghio et al., 2021, p. 8), may be stemming from the need to manage the author-facing payments that Open Access models involve, which inherently promotes funding-related transparency. Reference Serghiou, S., Contopoulos-Ioannidis, D. G., Boyack, K. W., Riedel, N., Wallach, J. D., & Ioannidis, J. P. (2021). Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: how open is open?. PLoS biology, 19(3), e3001107.

Beyond the contribution that the Plan S can be expected to make to the adoption of transformative Open Access agreements by libraries and publishers alike, as the article by Bianco and Patrizii (2020, p. 60) shows, it is notable that it can be considered as a market intervention. Yet this article also clearly indicates that between 2012 and 2016 the model that has apparently led to the most significant reduction in the market share of closed-access journals is that of hybrid Open Access, which grew from 36.2% to 45% over this period, whereas the share of journals based on subscriptions only has declined by about 11 percentage points from 49.2% to 37.7%, in a near perfect illustration of a zero-sum game. By contrast, apparently Gold Open Access journals, based on article processing charges, have only grown from 12.4% in 2012 to 15.2% in 2016. In other words, to the extent that Open Access stands for the reduction in barriers to existing knowledge, for the period the model that has made the greatest contribution to the achievement of this goal is hybrid Open Access. From the market failure perspective, this model may also be called the most efficient for this period. Yet as the chart of Bianco and Patrizii (2020, p. 62) also demonstrates, for research libraries serial, i.e., journal, subscription costs have been projected to be the fastest growing expense category for this period and thereafter, which is likely interrelated with the interest in the Plan S whose membership primarily draws on third-party funders and charitable trusts. Therefore, while the Plan S can be expected to assist the university libraries to cope with existing and future budget limitations, such as by promoting specific Open Access models, its implications for the publishing market remain to be discovered.

As the articles collected in the volume Open Access and the Library, which Anja Oberländer and Torsten Reimer have edited, indicate, the earliest preprint servers date to the early 1990s, which predates the mainstream use of computers, e-mail and the Internet. At the same time, the Covid-19 crisis has pushed medical, health and biological science preprint services, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, into the media limelight and scholarly focus. Both the earliest uses of preprints, such as arXiv, and the more recent ones have been driven by the need to promote the rapid dissemination of scholarly findings. What apparently distinguishes newer preprint servers, such as medRxiv, is the additional discovery- and attribution-oriented digital tools that they offer.The urgency of the coronavirus crisis has also apparently driven collaborations with Open Access journal publishers, such as PLOS, for topical conversations, expert discussions and project crowdsourcing. The newer slate of preprint servers also not infrequently have backing from charitable or non-profit foundations, such as the Wellcome Trust or Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which distinguishes these from earlier generation servers, primarily supported by research institutes, e.g., the CERN. The main implication of this is the likely instability of preprint server funding, despite the important functions they perform.Similarly, successful preprint models appear to be bound to specific fields of inquiry or disciplines, e.g., particle physics, so that preconditions for launching and maintaining preprint servers for other research areas, such as humanities or social sciences, are not necessarily present.  The same may also apply to information distribution and discovery channels for digital collections, which may need to depend on libraries or joint initiatives, to become established.