Open Access: Current Overview and Future Prospects

This paper examines, with emphasis upon the United States, the current status of open access and its future prospects from a literature review of items published since 2015. The examination of sources goes beyond articles in scholarly journals to include columns in the blog The Scholarly Kitchen and other selected resources as needed to fill gaps. With the enormity of the literature on the subject, the analysis does not claim to be comprehensive and focuses on key issues. This author takes care to look beyond STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) 1 fields to discuss the effect of open access in the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts. Overall, open access today looks very different from the goals of its proponents in 2002. For authors, open access has increased availability of scholarly resources and fostered distribution of their research, often after the payment of fees. Large commercial publishers have found ways to benefit from open access through author processing charges and by acquiring smaller presses. Open access overall has not allowed libraries to save money on serials subscriptions and has often increased costs through their support of institutional repositories and payment of author fees. Continued library support for open access is often more of a philosophical stance without significant cost-saving benefits.