A Rough Year and Road for OA
2024 was a rough year for OA, and the road ahead looks bleak
We may remember 2024 as the year OA’s aura of inevitability dissipated, and new strategic options began to whisper anew about possibilities.
PLOS needed a bailout 20+ years into its existence because its best journals aren’t profitable while its bulk-publishing behemoth (PLOS ONE) has had its schtick swiped by larger and more efficient/effective commercial publishers.
eLife — itself bailed out a few times by its funders — was exploited by authors and a streaming service, and is now going to be de-indexed, having strayed too far into preprint-fueled editorial indecisiveness to be considered a journal, all in order to be more “open.”
Other OA megajournals — Elsevier’s Heliyon and Springer Nature’s recently acquired Cureus — are also on hold while claims of publishing low-quality articles, operating paper mill-compatible options, and other issues are investigated.
Meanwhile, the shockwaves of the Wiley/Hindawi debacle still reverberate.
These are just symptoms of a systemic problem with OA, one that more and more entities are willing to identify and move to correct — or simply avoid.
But the list goes on and on . . .