UCL Press Head of Publishing Lara Speicher recently attended the OASPA Conference 2025, where open access advocates, publishers, librarians and researchers from around the world gathered to explore the future of scholarly communication. The conference focused on the theme Embracing the Complexity – How Do We Get to 100% OA?, sparking rich discussions around infrastructure, equity and collaboration. In her blog post below, Lara shares her reflections on the key takeaways and challenges ahead.
The OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association) annual conference is always an excellent opportunity to hear the latest updates in open access from a wide range of representatives involved in scholarly publishing and communications from around the world. This year’s conference, held in the beautiful city of Leuven, where the university is celebrating its 600th year, was no exception, with presentations on OA initiatives in China, India, USA, Canada, Europe, UK, Japan, South Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
Keynote presentations considered the progress in open access to date as well as addressing how much more work there is to be done to get to 100% OA. Demmy Verbeke, Head of Artes, KU Leuven Libraries’ Arts and Humanities collections, opened the conference with a presentation on the bold approach to open access taken by Leuven University, where they do not have an APC fund or enter into transformative agreements, rather they choose to invest in fair open access initiatives and community approaches, repurposing part of the collection budget for this purpose. Verbeke presented the case for knowledge as a public good, not a commodity, and argued that academics should play a greater role in driving change through their publishing choices.
Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at the Wellcome Trust, presented Wellcome’s goal for 100% OA and the recent changes made to the Wellcome Trust’s policies to help to achieve this. Funds have been redirected from transformative agreements towards the wider OA publishing ecosystem, supporting infrastructure for both Wellcome- and non-Wellcome funded researchers. She highlighted global differences in scholarly communications systems and drew attention to the fact that while the majority of attention around open science is directed to North America and Europe, for many countries OA is the starting point. Citing the growing volatility in north-western parts of the world, Hope made the case that our privileged publishing systems and our very institutions are under threat and that significant change is required.
Professor Wei Yang (Zhejiang University; National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC; China Association of Science and Technology, CAST & Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS) set out the publishing and open access landscape in China, where a preference for publishing in high-ranking Anglophone journals is prevalent. While China contributes around £909 million dollars in APCs to journals outside of China, representing around 30% of global open access, only 5% of journal articles by Chinese authors are published in Chinese journals. To address this, the government has introduced a requirement that 20% of funded authors’ articles have to publish in Chinese journals. Yang also highlighted the growth in recent years in scholarly output from the Global South, which now represents around 50% of total outputs.
OASPA conferences feature large university presses, commercial publishers and society publishers as well as small university presses and community-based initiatives. This year’s conference featured sessions including representatives from Cambridge University Press and Wiley, who discussed transformative agreements, among other things: what they have achieved so far, the challenges with TAs and whether they can lead to a full transition to OA. Other panels discussed the much broader topic of who owns knowledge with panellists from SPARC and the United Nations, and researcher incentives with panellists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and NWO Dutch Research Council, among others. Among the community initiatives presented were the Big 10 Open Alliance in the USA, a collective of university presses working to increase their open access publishing, and the Open Journals Collective, a new initiative launching in 2026 that will make available over 350 open access journals from university presses and institutional publishers in a library subscription model.
I participated in a panel chaired by Niels Stern, Managing Director of the OAPEN Foundation, about fully open access book publishing to present UCL Press’s model and our achievements in the last 10 years. Other panellists included Johannesburg University Press, Amherst College Press and Firenze University Press and the discussion covered governance, funding models and sustainability, quality and demonstrating impact. While the four presses had many points in common, our funding models differed quite substantially, highlighting that the routes for publishing OA books remain disparate and varied.
This blog features just a few key highlights, and there were many other panel discussions and lightning talks, too numerous to cover here, showcasing other OA initiatives happening around the world. All in all, a fantastic and inspiring conference.
