How to Think about the Pace of Substitution of Open Access Academic Journals for Traditional Subscription Journals

Abstract

As librarians, academic authors and editors, publishers, and others interested in scholarly communication consider the future, one of the pressing questions is: How fast will open access journals replace traditional subscription journals? It is clear that there are more open access journals now than a few years ago and that open access journals have become an important vehicle for some scholarly communication, but how long will we have to wait for this vehicle to become dominant? This paper will consider this question and use a simple model to explore it. The conclusion is that between 2018 and 2019 open access journals are likely to comprise 50% of all academic journals and should be approaching 90% of all academic journals by 2022. While the data used in the study has some limitations and the methods are somewhat crude, I believe the conclusions are generally sound. I would invite others to refine the data and the methodology.