The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) has launched a new initiative for 2025 titled the ‘Next 50%’, intended to convene publishing organizations with the stakeholders who finance, support, and invest in scholarly communication systems. Developed in collaboration with Research Consulting, the initiative aims to build on recent OASPA outputs, including widely shared recommendations that address financial and workflow-related barriers to open access.
The announcement follows OASPA’s recent article in Katina, which outlined the challenges of completing the open access transition. While roughly half of scholarly publishing output has shifted to open access, the remaining transition presents more complex systemic, financial, and structural hurdles. The initiative encourages participation from across the research ecosystem to reevaluate priorities and identify practical steps to support a more inclusive and sustainable scholarly publishing model.
OASPA has engaged with its membership and the broader scholarly community over the past year, holding discussions with libraries, consortia, funders, and publishing organizations. These conversations suggest that the progress made in the past decade was comparatively more straightforward than the challenges now facing the open access movement. Many stakeholders have emphasized the need for more cohesive and collaborative dialogue.
The ‘Next 50%’ project seeks to facilitate that shift in conversation—moving beyond transactional models toward broader goals of openness and equity in scholarly communication. Rather than simply converting additional paywalled content, the project is designed to explore models that enable access for all researchers, disciplines, and approaches to knowledge creation.
To achieve this, the initiative will examine multiple pathways to open access. These include author-pays models such as article processing charges (APCs), collective funding strategies like Read & Publish or Subscribe to Open agreements, grant- and library-funded models with no publication charges, and the role of non-commercial publishing infrastructures. The project also aims to include publishers who already operate fully open access models and those navigating transitions within specific disciplines or publishing formats.
The effort will involve focused conversations across stakeholder groups and will incorporate survey data and workshops. Participants will include OASPA members, along with libraries, consortia, and funding agencies. Insights generated through these activities will inform community strategies and will contribute to the programming at the upcoming OASPA 2025 annual conference, which will address the complexities of transitioning to 100% open access.
By initiating the ‘Next 50%’ project, OASPA is working to support informed and inclusive progress in the scholarly publishing sector, reinforcing its commitment to advancing openness in ways that are sustainable, equitable, and reflective of the diverse needs of the global research community.
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