At the 2018 UKSG Conference in Glasgow, Liam Earney, the Director of Jisc Collections, questioned the extent of progress of the OA transition in the UK as well as its impacts. He showed some eloquent numbers regarding the sustainability of the Gold model with APC: “[a]verage APC increased in cost by 16% from 2013 to 2016”. Moreover, “70% of UK OA articles are published in hybrid journals, yet subscription expenditure has continued to grow”. Far from being a solution to the infamous periodicals crisis that relentlessly eats away at libraries’ acquisition budgets, open access funding based on the author-pays model – largely picked up by commercial publishers – appears to have had the opposite effect of adding to the problem. In order to deal with this situation, a third approach must be found to ensure fair funding for journals in open access, as well as increased participation of stakeholders in the scholarly publication field to the administration of non-commercial research dissemination infrastructures. This is what Érudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network have achieved, by developing a partnership model in support of open access, and which is now part of Coalition Publi.ca. This presentation will provide an overview of the current editorial offering in the open access sector and address the impacts of its development. It will then focus on the Coalition Publi.ca initiative and how its full implementation is tide to by a renewed engagement of the scholarly community in the publishing ecosystem.
