Nurturing The Open Access Ecosystem

In the last post of a short series reflecting on the Getting in the Access Loop webinar organised by the Humanitarian Centre, HIFA2015 and PLOS, Marina Kukso discusses the challenges faced by the Open Access movement as it comes of age.

Open access (OA) scholarly publishing has passed the initial proof of concept stage and can now be considered a mature field. Many of the earliest OA publishers are now widely-known and well-established and new open access journals are launched every day.

As the OA publishing field has broadened, what challenges exist to the success of all actors within the OA publishing community and to the health of the entire OA publishing landscape? Is actual access to publication in OA journals (and all of the attendant capacity-building benefits) occurring or do barriers to access follow historic and geographic inequalities? There are several challenges currently facing the success of all actors in the open access ecosystem and the health of the system overall...