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The Future

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Currently the Open Access publishing models are substitutes of the conventional publishing models. According to Peter Suber the traditional publishing models will coexist in the future with the OA publishing models.

Some of the necessary conditions for the OA publishing models to expand in the future are:

To satisfy the expectations of the scientific community in terms of quality, rapidity, clear copyright agreements and increased impact.
To develop and establish user-friendly and functional mechanisms and procedures.
The acceptance of the innovative OA publishing model by the majority of the stakeholders.
The international and interdisciplinary cooperation concerning the interoperability of the OA systems.
The sustainability of the OA publishing business models.

Hesitations & disincentives

Although the majority of the academic and research community is in favour of open access models, they express reservations and doubts about open access publications. More precisely they are skeptical about:

1. Cost aspects

Although the production and publication of open access literature is less expensive than the conventional publication models, it nevertheless has costs that need to be met. The most popular ways of covering these costs are: 1. the author-pay model, where authors pay the publication fees for their article (most of the times those fees are paid by the author's university or institute); 2. OA publishers can obtain long-term funding from foundations and government funding agencies; 3. set up governmental policies and mandates for self-archiving in OA repositories of publicly funded research results; 4. obtain funds from private resources e.g. through sponsorships and advertising.

2. Quality-assurance issues

OA scientific journals are less prestigious than some printed scientific journals because: 1. they are at the beginning of their life-cycle, so they do not yet have a high visibility and the scientific experts are not interested in participating in the peer-review process; 2. the majority of the scientific community is not familiar with the Internet.

Another reason for which many scholars and researchers are skeptical about the quality and the peer-review procedures of the OA publications is that anybody can be an OA publisher by using the relevant open source software. Subsequently, the majority tend not to be experts in scientific publishing, using arbitrary quality criteria.

3. Copyrights

In conventional publishing, the integrity of the authors' work is protected by the publishers. In a digital environment, authors are concerned about their copyright protection. The main questions of the scientific community concern the lack of a legal digital copyright framework, and the special nature of the Internet. Most OA declarations use the consent of the copyright holder as a legal basis, without trying to change the established legal basis for copyright.

4. Long-term availability and preservation

The viability of OA models funded by public funds is threatened because this manner of funding is not long-term. This is quite alarming, given the fact that most OA publications are publicly funded.

To ensure economic viability and long-term availability, the OA publishers and repositories should find new business models. Many business models have been tested since the emergence of the open access movement.

Anti-OA initiatives

The open access movement has dramatically changed the publication industry and has reversed the traditional roles and status-quo. Many STM publishers have expressed their opposition to the OA movement by releasing anti-OA declarations. The most important anti-OA initiatives are: