Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication
From the Budapest Open Access Initiative to Diamond OA — twenty-five years of progress
Abstract
The Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002 articulated a simple but radical proposition: scholarly research, funded largely by public money, should be freely available to everyone. A quarter-century later, open access has moved from fringe principle to mainstream practice — with Plan S mandates reshaping European research funding, OSTP directing US federal agencies to require immediate public access, and Diamond OA emerging as the preferred model for journals in the Global South.
This article traces the evolution of open access from its ideological origins through the growth of repositories (PubMed Central, arXiv, Zenodo), the rise of article processing charges (APCs) as a controversial funding mechanism, and the emergence of platform cooperatives like PKP and its Open Journal Systems as a third way: infrastructure-level openness that removes both the author-pays barrier and the reader-pays barrier simultaneously.
We argue that the next frontier for open access is not simply making articles free to read, but making the entire publishing stack — from editorial management to typesetting to distribution — open, auditable, and community-governed. OJS and its ecosystem of plugins, themes, and hosting providers represent the most mature instantiation of this vision, and we examine what further investments in infrastructure, capacity building, and international cooperation are needed to fulfil the promise of truly universal scholarly communication.
