Pathways to Open – Conclusion

In the Open Access – Pathways to Open chapters, you have explored the pathways to open, including OA challenges and opportunities and the growth of funder and institution OA mandates and policies.

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. OA provides greater readership due to open widespread sharing, an increase in citations of the material shared, and it eliminates access barriers based on the time it takes to go through the traditional publication processes. Funders (e.g. Tri-Agencies) and institutions (MIT, Harvard) have responded to OA through the development of mandates and policies that encourage and sometimes require researchers to make their research publications openly available.

While there are a number of benefits to OA, the challenges, such as the importance of impact metrics in the academy and the offloading of cost to publish to the researcher (i.e. APCs), impact the success of the movement taking a larger hold. Additionally, there are a number of inequalities within the OA movement that need to be addressed by the community, including equal participation of research sharing from the Global South and the potential for OA to reinforce a culture of extraction of Indigenous knowledge. The OA movement needs to ensure that it does not replicate the publishing practices of the past.