Has the OA Plateau Arrived?
Two recent reports suggest OA may have plateaued.
It’s been different watching the OA space recently. Instead of the endless hype, cockiness, self-righteousness, and bullying of old, these days the space is much more muted, with occasional fealty to reality, and some occasional bickering among the advocates themselves as to why things have taken so long, not worked out so well, or proven more problematic than they imagined, and a general pall over the movement.
But here we are, at what a new DeltaThink report suggests may be the plateau of OA adoption, with growth among non-OA articles outpacing growth in OA articles for 2023, noting:
For the first time, growth in OA fell below that of the underlying scholarly journals market.
The chart below shows the flattening of the curve:
Delta Think is quick to speculate that this is just a blip, but I think that’s just a holding statement for the OA extremists, in order to avoid torches and pitchforks.
It’s not like OA was going gangbusters before, really. From 2019-22, it grew slightly in share of market, but it didn’t look like it was going to dominate the market before mid-century. Now even that seems less likely, especially given the recent and consistent bad news about quality in the OA space:
In a separate article, the move of a journal from Elsevier to MIT Press over the price of APCs draws out some other headwinds facing OA — how large commercial publishers have “co-opted” it; how adoption has slowed; how crises in academia overshadow it; and, how the scale demands of OA are at-odds with achieving and maintaining quality outputs.
A quarter century into the OA movement, it seems to have reached a plateau, and may begin to descend to a lower level of adoption as cost burdens, quality concerns, and less tolerance for ideological bullying about business models become more widespread.