Author: Steve Lodge, VP Services, Emerald Publishing
In December 2024, we launched The Open Lab, a dedicated Incubator unit, to explore the key questions about incentivising open access (OA), enhancing research accessibility, creating better value, the future of paid access, ensuring equity, and real-world impact.
What follows is a reflection on the latest recommendations and the role of publishers in the OA landscape.
The conversation around open access has substantially shifted in recent years amid concerns that the implementation of it as a publication model across the industry has ultimately entrenched inequities. As a result, over the last two years equity has become a central theme of many publishers, funders and industry bodies. This is overdue. At Emerald Publishing, we’re committed to being a part of this conversation. Equity is a part of our overarching purpose. As a responsible business, we strive to achieve equity in the way we conduct ourselves and in the publishing opportunities we provide.
For this reason, we’ve taken great interest in OASPA’s Recommended Practices and Plan S’s draft “How Equitable is It?” framework. We appreciate both bodies for their efforts towards creating a more equitable future. As an OASPA member, we’ll keep their recommendations in mind as we develop our own open models. What is apparent from the outcomes and conclusions of both reports is that more is needed to develop sustainable guidance on best practice.
Firstly, there’s the issue of equating equity with openness. The Plan S framework in particular awards points for equity based on the extent to which a journal adopts open practices. For instance, while open data where possible is a commendable practice, achieving maximum points by mandating the sharing of all data and code assumes that all researchers have the required resources, capacity, and training.
Similarly, while making reuse terms clear is an important part of the definition of open access, we must ask ourselves whether Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) should be the end goal of openness? While Creative Commons Licences solved an issue in creating intermediate stages between public domain and copyright control in the early days of the internet, the licence was not designed specifically for academic research outputs. Furthermore, the conversation about open access has matured, particularly within the context of AI. Should the owners of Generative AI models be able to use open content with impunity? Have the opinions of researchers been considered? We don’t know the answers here, which is why we’re currently exploring this question with our research community. We must ensure that prioritising openness above all else doesn’t result in the system further slipping into inequity.
This leads to the next issue: both recommendations primarily address the financial barriers of equity. But they don’t fully address the inequities inherent within the publishing process itself. OASPA does acknowledge following the feedback process that this is only the first step. But neither ask if open access is really the answer to inequity.
Open access doesn’t tackle local language issues, nor biases inherent in peer review. It doesn’t ask whether making an article open access is enough to make it truly accessible. Open access and equity are not synonymous. By conflating the two, it makes it difficult to move the conversation on, and we risk missing opportunities to explore potentially more effective solutions. While The Open Lab is primarily focused on open access, we are also willing to acknowledge when OA is not the (only) answer.
Finally, as a commercial publisher, neither framework offers a sustainable concrete solution to maximise equity. Their recommendations echo one another, that financial barriers should be removed, and all authors and institutions should be able to participate equally, and publishing OA should be default. It is heartening to see the practices promoted by OASPA, but no practices meeting all the recommendations are in a position of being proven to be both scalable and sustainable.
We’re open to experimentation ourselves – it’s the very purpose of The Open Lab – but receiving the same recommendations from different bodies is unhelpful unless they begin to come with viable solutions for sustainable funding. There are inherent costs in the publishing and dissemination of scholarly content, and there’s a cyclical dialogue about ‘who pays’. While some organisations can view publishing as a cost, rather than revenue generating, the reality is that it cannot be treated in this way by commercial publishers. We must ensure that any transition is economically viable and enables us to continually invest in our systems and people.
OASPA’s recommendation that all participants in the ecosystem need to work together is well-intentioned, but commercial publishers of all sizes and model types continue to be treated as a monolith. Yet many are placing significant investment into infrastructures and programmes – including open access – to create a more sustainable future. This includes innovations in author and reader experiences and workflows to address issues of equity and accessibility.
Our own passion is in the social sciences, fields of research which continually struggle for funding yet are so vital for our culture. Emerald remains actively engaged with our global author and library communities. We’re prepared to engage further with OASPA, Plan S and other stakeholders in the pursuit of genuine collaboration on a diversity of open models for research communities.
We’re at the table, and we want to be part of the solution, not the problem. Please feel free to reach out to us at: [email protected]

Fairer society
We are passionate about working with researchers globally to deliver a fairer, more inclusive society. This perhaps has never been more important than in today’s divided world.