OASPA 2024: Miradouros Over the Open Access Publishing Landscape

By Joanna Ball (Managing Director, DOAJ)

Miradouros, or viewpoints, are an important feature of the hilly city of Lisbon. They offer breathtaking panoramic views taking in the city’s unique blend of history, culture, and natural beauty. Each miradouro has its own distinct character, often surrounded by gardens, cafés, and street art, creating spaces for relaxation and reflection. Many of them are not only tourist attractions but also function as community hubs, where locals come to socialise, enjoy music, or simply enjoy the sunset.

The exact number of miradouros to be found in Lisbon is debatable (8, 13, 30?). Taking a step back from the bustle of the city streets, they provide an opportunity to enjoy the iconic skyline from a different perspective, and to see the overall patterns that reflect the deeper historical and cultural sections of the city, including the castle of São Jorge, the grid-like city centre rebuilt after the disastrous earthquake in 1755 and the colourful rooftops of Alfama.

Libson also provided the setting for this year’s OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) conference in September. Held for the first time as an in-person conference since before the pandemic in Copenhagen in 2019, the event served as a series of miradouros for the open access landscape, providing an opportunity for discussion and reflection from different viewpoints.

The conference brought together 163 delegates from 132 organisations, just over half of whom had a publishing programme: publishers, librarians, service providers and researchers. Most came from Europe, but there was representation from other areas of the world, including North America, Latin America, Africa and India.

The conference opened with a powerful panel session from the vantage point of equity, presenting different perspectives from across the world and from infrastructures, researchers and publishers. The panel focused on themes of fairness, justice, and inclusion: how can we ensure that access to resources is equitable on a global scale? Durhane Wong-Rieger of the Canadian Organization for Rare Disorders drew on her experience from the patient community’s approach of “nothing about us without us” and challenged delegates to constantly ask themselves to identify who is missing from important discussions and to actively include them, thereby ensuring that diversity is reflected in our governance structures, decision-making and membership. Joy Owango of the Training Centre in Communication, University of Nairobi, provided the example of Tanzania’s new science and technology open access policy as a potential for local actions to inspire broader changes, and encouraged us to have uncomfortable conversations around equity with our communities.

The topic of equity in scholarly communications was a recurring theme throughout the three days, picked up by Reggie Raju in a compelling call for social justice and the philosophy of ubuntuism and communityism in publishing, based on collective responsibility, communal support and equitable access to knowledge creation and dissemination. Reggie argued that whereas many of the discussions around OA focus on the reallocation of funding, in Africa which is underfunded, the focus must be upon the principles and process of making meaningful change. Devika Madalli extended this in her keynote, with a call not for action but for disruption to how knowledge is published and distributed and to how we evaluate research.

Precarity within open access was also a theme, both at the institutional level for individual researchers and within the diamond business model. The precarious nature of diamond OA pointed to a broader trend of instability within the academic community. Focussing on open access books, Joe Deville from Mattering Press stressed the necessity of building networks and fostering collaborations to support a more sustainable publishing ecosystem, while Judith Fathallah from Coventry University highlighted the importance of including authors in the publishing process and collaborating with librarians to create a more inclusive environment. There was a call to inspire and empower more women in academia from Noni Dube, who gave the example of her network SWAN (Southern Women Academics Network) which connects over 100 women of Global South origins to collaborate over bids, share experiences and challenges and co-mentor each other. Elsewhere, Catherine Mitchell (California Digital Library) highlighted the problem of institutional publishing being seen as a “labour of love,” and called for the community to be honest and open about the sustainability challenges of invisible labour. The technical challenges faced by institutional publishers were addressed in another panel, with an overwhelming response from the audience on the requirements for help with metadata, visibility and more.

Further panels featured discussions on assessing the real-world value and return on investment for open access publishing; tools, frameworks and recommended practices to reduce inequities in open access; ways to build trust and support research integrity; and also generative AI and how it intersects with openness and research integrity.

It was clear that delegates valued the return to an in-person edition of the OASPA conference, and made the most of the networking opportunities, including an evening reception in the nearby beautiful botanical gardens of Estufa Fria.

The keynotes from Rebecca Ross (Open Climate Campaign) and Maurice York (Big Ten Academic Alliance) epitomised the sense of hope and collaboration throughout the conference. OA is a prerequisite to solving the climate crisis. “What if the planet can’t wait for us to sort out our business model?” asked Rebecca, as she launched the Open Climate Campaign’s Unbinding project to open up access to climate science and biodiversity research articles. The presentation left a buzz of energy in the room, and several publishers reached out afterwards to request their lists of closed papers and to offer support. Maurice highlighted that our community shares the North Star of a just, trustworthy, scalable and sustainable open knowledge ecosystem, but that this will require new ways of thinking. He gave the example of the goal of cost-effectiveness for library consortia, traditionally measured by cost savings. If we are truly mission-led, our values and principles are just as, if not more, important but we don’t yet have the metrics to measure progress in equity, openness, justice and public good. The business models and ways of working together in the future are still to be created and will require a paradigm shift in the approach of all members of the scholarly publishing community. He ended with a call for the OASPA community to come together to contribute our unique perspectives and expertise to find solutions: “only all of us know enough.”

Recordings of all sessions will be made available via the OASPA website.