A (Generally) Positive Outlook
Scholars in the field are hopeful that current trends towards broader access and flexible copyright policies will continue. This is mainly due to pressure being applied by granting agencies and institutions on their faculty members. According to Chadwell and Sutton,
The current trend of OA policies being implemented by granting agencies and university faculties will accelerate over the next 20 years and lead to near-universal adoption of requirements for immediate OA to scholarly articles and research data. An ever-increasing number of governmental granting agencies are already requiring OA or “public access” to the articles (and in some cases, data) produced by the research they sponsor.
The Green vs Gold OA argument will likely continue into the future. However, more and more people are seeing that Green and Gold OA are not two points on a polarized spectrum; instead, both models are necessary to facilitate change to the scholarly publishing system in a meaningful way.
Funding Models
According to the DOAJ, there was a 15 per cent increase in the number of titles from 2012-2013, with 3.5 new journals added to the directory each day for a total of 9,804 at the end of 2013. Furthermore, aproximately 65% of these journals do not charge APCs. In addition to this growth in OA journals, institutional and non-profit repositories, akin to the arXiv model, have been growing steadily. While journals will "remain a prominent method through which research is distributed in the twenty-first century, there will be an increasing recognition by scholars and faculty reward and recognition systems that the quality and impact of one’s scholarship is not solely dictated by the prestige of the journal title through which it is distributed."
With respect to supply-versus-demand-funding models, it is likely that the two will continue in parallel for the forseeable future. Journals that shift the economic burden onto authors will need to deal with market forces and elasticity. Some critics argue that the even with APCs, traditional market forces will not be able to lower prices (ranging in the thousands of dollars for some disciplines.) Nevertheless, ideally, APCs will typically be in the hundreds of dollars, rather than the thousands of dollars. Should this be the case, OA options will become much more "attractive to scholars in the humanities, social sciences and other areas that do not benefit from large external funding sources." In addition, institutional consortia, scholarly societies, and governments will need to work together to support and subsidize OA article publishing. The CRKN/ERUDIT partnership is one such example in the Canadian context.
New Roles for Libraries and Librarians
Academic libraries will have an increasingly important role to play in the future of scholarly communications. Libraries and librarians will need to scale their services to assist Open Access initiatives at their institutions, and institutional members of regional consortia. For example, librarians will need to help academics manage the peer-review and editing workflow for new Open Access journals, set up departmental, faculty, and institutional repositories, and assist researchers with making their research data available online.
Tennant, Jonathan P, et al. (2016). The Academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review. F1000Research, 5(632), 4-23. (doi:10.12688/f1000research.8460.3)
Faye Chadwell, Shan C. Sutton, (2014) "The future of open access and library publishing", New Library World, Vol. 115 Issue: 5/6,pp. 225-236, (doi: 10.1108/NLW-05-2014-0049)