Berlin 17 and the road to next generation open access

Jisc has been a longstanding participant in both the OA2020 and the Berlin conferences, sharing the UK’s strategies and learning from international peers.

Since its inception in 2003, the Open Access conference (OA2020) has played a key role in shaping the open access movement, offering a unique space for consortia and libraries to engage directly with senior leaders from the academic publishing industry. It’s a place to celebrate progress, confront ongoing challenges, and find collaborative solutions.

The Berlin meetings have helped define pivotal milestones for open access. Berlin 13, for example, reinforced the idea that subscription funds should be redirected to support sustainable OA business models. Berlin 16 highlighted that removing paywalls must not lead to new barriers in open science participation.

These conversations have led to real progress, including clearer, more aligned publishing licenses that better serve the needs of researchers.

Berlin 17

The first day of the conference brought together publishers, libraries and consortia. This year’s programme included panels on author rights, equitable terms for open access publishing, research integrity, and publication ethics.

The second day shifted focus to libraries and consortia, offering space to reflect on the publisher perspective and discuss shared progress, barriers and strategies.

The conference concluded with a final statement outlining the collective negotiations priorities for the year ahead.

This year’s statement outlines four key objectives for negotiations with publishers for 2025:

Academy control

This supports the retention of rights by academic authors. In the UK, universities and research organisations have rapidly adopted rights retention policies to support this.

At the last count, 54 UK universities had policies in place, with another 25 in development. The exclusive transfer of rights to publishers is seen by many to limit the goals of open access: research that is free to access and free to re-use.

Scholarly control of computational methods

This ensures researchers can freely determine how text and data mining (TDM) and artificial intelligence (AI) use their work.

Participants felt strongly that it is scholars who should determine how these methodologies should be employed, and that appropriate licences should be used.

Crucially, researchers must be able to use computational analysis to perform research.

Data transparency

This enables a fair and sustainable transition to open access and open research by ensuring that the data needed to track process, measure impact and foster collaboration is openly available.

Participants urged publishers to adopt the practices highlighted in the Barcelona Declaration.

Transparent pricing

As publishing models evolve, fees must reflect the actual services provided. Organisations need confidence that costs are fair and based on real value.

These objectives are closely aligned with the sector's next generation open access requirements.

Many consortia and institutions shared their adoption of next generation open access principles, and there was a growing recognition of the need for sustainable article growth and a greater emphasis on open research practices to help ‘depressurise the system’.

A global movement

Berlin 17 offered a powerful reminder of open access as a truly global journey. Hearing from countries across the world on their own progress and barriers demonstrates how this is a global movement - even if everyone is at a different stage.

The UK, for example, is beginning to reflect on the limitations of transitional read and publish agreements, while others are just entering that stage, exploring potential benefits for their own research communities.

Challenges and barriers

We also heard about barriers in contexts very different from our own.

Many lower and middle-income countries articulated the frustrations of their authors being rejected from journals based not on the quality of their research but seemingly based on their non-western name or geographical location. Others described challenges in getting local journals indexed in established databases.

We even heard from multiple institutions in countries where publishers claim there’s ‘no demand’ for open access, detailing repeated attempts to negotiate transitional agreements that have been declined.

Berlin 18

I’m already looking forward to Berlin 18 and the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve achieved in 2025, not only in the UK, but globally. OA2020 continues to demonstrate the power of international collaboration and shows what’s possible when we align our efforts across borders.

Find out more about our next generation open access programme.