Open Research Community

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.