At this point we have looked at the beginnings of open access, what it means now and the various reactions surrounding it, but now we will look at what we can expect for the immediate future.

We can see that open access is not going away anytime soon and is in fact growing. Examples include the REF 2021 and Plan S. In addition, we have seen an increase in open access deals such as the recent one between Springer and 700 German universities. Though these deals are controversial as they do not translate to complete open access, they are nonetheless a stepping point towards it. Open access also does face problems despite its growth, such as a recent article from Science Magazine highlighting that open access megajournals are in fact declining in performance.

REF2021

Most of those who have been following us up to this point are probably very familiar with the REF 2021. As part of the rules governing REF 2021, submissions must follow, at minimum, the green open access route. The gold open access route is also an option and is sometimes preferred, due to the embargo restrictions normally placed in green open access. For guidance on how to deposit your academic outputs to the Greenwich Academic Literature Archive we have tutorials available. It is important to note that if you plan on going through the green open access route, that you are aware of any embargoes and of the deadlines REF 2021 imposes. These deadlines include that you must deposit an article or conference proceeding item no later than three months after the date acceptance. After the item has been deposited it must meet the open access requirements. If there is no embargo then the output must be available within one month of deposit, conversely if there is an embargo then it must be available within one month after it expires. If you decide to follow the gold route these do not apply to your output.

The UK isn’t the only country to have a REF. In fact, other countries have their own versions, such as Australia and their Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).

Plan S

Our next point of notice is Plan S. This is a funder driven movement to make it compulsory for publicly funded scientific research to be published in purely open access journals from 2021 onwards. A more detailed description of Plan S can be found one of our previous blog posts: Plan S – Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access.

In addition to open access there are also similar movements, believing in similar principles for different fields. Such examples include:

• Open Data. The belief that all data should be openly available and can be reused.
• Open source software. The movement that believes that software code should be openly available, reused and modified by everyone.
• Open science. The general umbrella movement that includes both of the previous movements, but also includes others that share the same goal of making research open and transparent.

From all of this we can see there is more than just open access. That the principles are not restricted to this one particular movement, and that there are others that share them as well. If you have reached this far and you would like to get a more in depth understanding about the history of open access, then you can find more details at Ars Technica.