Towards a Competitive and Sustainable OA Market in Europe - A Study of the Open Access Market and Policy Environment

Deliverable 5.3  of  OpenAIRE WP5: FP7 Post Grant Gold Open Access Pilot. 

This deliverable consists of a study and an annex - and it will be supplemented by a roadmap in May 2017.

This study considers the economic factors contributing to the current state of the open-access publishing market, and evaluates the potential for European policymakers to enhance market competition and sustainability in parallel to increasing access. It was commissioned within the scope of the OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, and it will be accompanied by a Roadmap document developed with inputs from an expert workshop to be held in The Hague on 20 April 2017. In accordance with the project brief, the study aims to:

• Explore the current status of the OA publishing market
• Analyse existing OA publishing business models
• Evaluate how different national and international policies are complementing each other as a means to achieve a transition to OA
• Evaluate the impact of the Framework Programme 7 Post-grant OA pilot and its implications for future similar initiatives and the transition to OA.
• Provide a roadmap leading to a sustainable and competitive market

The transition to open access concerns all kinds of academic research outputs, including monographs, journal articles, and data. This study focuses on open access to peer-reviewed research articles, which constitute the bulk of the market and the primary mechanism through which research is disseminated across disciplinary communities and beyond.

This report is supplemented by an Annex containing a mid-term evaluation of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot.