How big is the open access publishing market

How Big is the Open Access Publishing Market?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

The academic publishing world has long been dominated by a subscription-based model, often humorously referred to as a system where public research (funded by public money) is locked behind an expensive paywall and then sold back to the very public institutions that generated it. It is a brilliant, if somewhat ethically questionable, business model. 

Enter open access publishing, the idealistic, disruptive counter-force that decided knowledge should be free, or at least, free to read. Open access publishing has transitioned from a fringe movement driven by passionate academics and librarians to a significant, measurable, and highly profitable sector of the scholarly communication industry. It’s no longer a question of “if” open access is a viable model, but “how large” and “how quickly” it is expanding its footprint.

The size of the open access market isn’t just about revenue. It’s a multifaceted metric that includes the sheer volume of articles, the number of journals, and the dollars changing hands through Article Processing Charges (APCs) and other funding mechanisms. Understanding the market size is critical for everyone involved: the researchers who need to publish, the institutions that fund the work, the libraries that manage access, and the major publishers who are swiftly transforming their business models to capture this new revenue stream. 

The Open Access Market: A Snapshot of Value and Growth

Attempting to pin down the exact monetary value of the open access publishing market can feel like trying to measure smoke. The scholarly publishing industry is notoriously opaque, and the open access landscape includes various revenue streams that are often intertwined with traditional subscription models, particularly in hybrid journals and transformative agreements. Despite these complexities, we have substantial, reliable data points that confirm one thing: the market is not only large but is experiencing explosive growth. Open access is no longer just chipping away at the subscription model; it is fundamentally reshaping it.

Current market estimates place the value of the open access journal publishing market at a significant figure. The global open-access journal publishing market has continued to grow, reaching approximately $2.38 billion in 2024. This expansion is expected to continue into 2025, with the market projected to grow to around $2.55 billion, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of about 7% through 2035. By 2035, the market is forecast to reach approximately $5 billion, indicating a robust upward trajectory for open-access publishing. 

These estimates are supported by recent market research reports and analyses that track global open access journal sales and revenue trends. Notably, Springer Nature, a major player in scholarly publishing, forecasts steady revenue growth driven by its open access portfolio, expecting revenues between 1.89 billion and 1.94 billion euros (approximately $2.06 billion to $2.12 billion) in 2025. These figures focus primarily on the revenues generated by various open access journal publishing activities, especially the highly visible Article Processing Charges (APCs). 

This rapid expansion is driven by several factors, including increasingly strict mandates from influential public and private funding agencies. The global push for Open Science, which advocates for greater transparency and reproducibility in research, has made open access the default for publicly funded work in many regions. Furthermore, the sheer volume of research output is increasing globally, and a growing percentage of that output is opting for an open pathway. 

For example, some analyses show that the percentage share of global scholarly articles, reviews, and conference papers made available via the Gold Open Access route has dramatically increased, from around 14% in 2014 to a whopping 40% in 2024. This shift in author behavior is the clearest sign that open access has moved from a choice to a dominant publishing mode.

Defining the Ecosystem: The Diverse Roads to Open Access

To understand the market size, one must first grasp the different models, or “roads,” that constitute the open access ecosystem. Open access is not a monolith. It is a spectrum of strategies that all share the common goal of making research literature freely available to readers, but differ significantly in how publication costs are covered and where the final version of the article resides. This multiplicity of models is a key factor in the market’s complexity and its expansive size.

The two original, most recognized paths are Gold and Green Open Access. Gold Open Access is arguably the most market-driven model, as it represents publishing in a fully open access journal, where all content is immediately free to read on the publisher’s website. Crucially, the costs for this immediate, permanent access are typically covered by an Article Processing Charge (APC), paid by the author, their institution, or their funder. 

This APC revenue is the primary component of that multi-billion-dollar market size we discussed. A subset of Gold Open Access is Hybrid Open Access, where a subscription journal offers authors the option to pay an APC to make their individual article open access within an otherwise closed journal. This model is controversial, with critics calling it “double-dipping” because the publisher collects both subscription fees from libraries and APCs from authors for the same journal.

The other major path is Green Open Access. This model involves the author publishing in a traditional subscription journal but then simultaneously or later self-archiving a version of the paper (often the accepted manuscript) in an institutional or subject-specific repository, making it free to read there. While Green Open Access increases article volume and accessibility, it does not directly contribute revenue to the open access market size figures in the same way APCs do, as it is primarily based on internal institutional infrastructure and library resources rather than publisher-collected fees. 

More recently, the Diamond Open Access model has gained prominence. These journals are also fully open access but do not charge APCs, with their costs covered by grants, institutional subsidies, or consortia. This model, while ethically pure to many, complicates market sizing because it involves non-monetized or institutionally subsidized publishing efforts.

The Financial Engine: Article Processing Charges

The core economic driver of the Gold and Hybrid Open Access market, and thus the largest component of its total value, is the APC. These are the fees paid by authors, their institutions, or their funding bodies to make a paper immediately and permanently open access. APCs have become the new subscription fee, a charge for service instead of an access charge, shifting the financial burden from the reader’s institution (the library) to the author’s institution (the research office or grant funder).

The price of an APC can vary wildly, ranging from a few hundred dollars for a modest, society-run journal to well over $10,000 for articles in some of the most prestigious, high-impact journals published by the major commercial houses. Elsevier, for instance, publishes a wide range of journals, and their APCs can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to over $10,000 for their top-tier titles. This vast differential is a source of both market excitement and significant controversy. The high-end APCs generate substantial revenue for publishers, fueling the market’s overall size, but they also raise serious questions about research equity and the exclusion of unfunded researchers from publishing in high-prestige venues.

The major publishing houses, which once fiercely defended the subscription model, are now aggressively pivoting to an open-access-centric strategy, often adopting the high-APC Gold Open Access model to maintain or even increase their profit margins. This strategic shift has turned APCs into a primary revenue generator and has fueled the open access market’s multi-billion-dollar valuation. 

The commercial sector realized that, far from being a threat, open access could be packaged, standardized, and sold back to the academy, often at a premium, as a service that ensures compliance with funder mandates and maximizes the visibility of an author’s work. The irony, of course, is that the same publishers are essentially repackaging the peer review and typesetting processes they already use and charging a hefty per-article fee for the “open” delivery.

Transformative Agreements: The Shifting Library Budgets

A major, albeit convoluted, factor driving the monetary size of the open access market is the rise of Transformative Agreements (TAs). These are contracts negotiated between publishers and research institutions, consortia, or nations. The goal is to transition from paying subscriptions for reading content to paying a bundled fee that covers both reading rights (the remaining paywalled content) and the APCs for the institution’s researchers to publish open access in the publisher’s journals (including hybrid titles). The mantra is “Read and Publish,” and the intent, backed by powerful initiatives like Plan S, is to flip subscription expenditures into open access publishing expenditures over time.

TAs have effectively rerouted massive streams of library subscription budgets directly into the open access publishing economy. Instead of a library spending, say, $2 million per year to let their patrons read journal Y, they now spend roughly the same amount, or perhaps slightly more, to both read Y and cover all of their affiliated authors’ APCs in journals published by that provider. This means the money being spent on open access is often the same money that was historically spent on subscriptions, but it has been reclassified. This reclassification is fundamental to understanding the market size, as it suggests a significant portion of the open access revenue isn’t entirely new money but a transformation of existing scholarly communication spend.

The value of these agreements can be staggering. Major TAs, often negotiated at the national level, cover thousands of journals and publications, representing multi-million-dollar commitments annually. While TAs are designed to accelerate the transition to open access, they also consolidate the market power of the largest publishers, which have the massive portfolios required for such comprehensive deals. This trend is central to the financial reality of open access: it is an expensive transition, and the funds being moved are substantial, cementing the market’s multi-billion-dollar scale and reinforcing the commercial sector’s dominance in this “open” future.

Geographical and Institutional Disparities in Open Access

The open access market is not a uniform global entity. Its size and shape are heavily influenced by geographic and institutional policies, creating both opportunity and significant disparity. The strongest market drivers for APC-based open access are found in regions with robust public research funding and strong institutional mandates. 

Europe and North America, with their powerful funding bodies and sophisticated consortia, have been the epicenters for the adoption of Transformative Agreements and the corresponding growth in Gold Open Access revenue. For example, initiatives such as Plan S, which mandates immediate open access for research funded by its members, have significantly driven the uptake of APCs and TAs across Europe.

In contrast, many countries in the Global South, while strongly committed to the philosophy of open access, often struggle with the financial burden of expensive APCs. For a researcher in a low- or middle-income country, a $5,000 APC can be an insurmountable barrier, effectively restricting their ability to publish in high-prestige Gold Open Access journals, even if their research is publicly funded. This situation has led to the growth of Diamond Open Access in these regions, where costs are covered by institutions or government subsidies rather than author fees. This non-APC revenue is often harder to track and less visible in billion-dollar market estimates, potentially leading to an underestimation of the global open access effort.

Major publishers often implement waiver and discount policies for researchers from low- and middle-income countries to address these inequities, which is a commendable step. However, the prevalence of high-cost APCs underscores a critical tension in the market: open access, intended to democratize access to research for readers, often creates a new form of exclusion for authors who cannot afford publication costs. The market’s current size is, in part, a reflection of the wealth distribution of global research funding, with the richest research institutions disproportionately contributing to the high-revenue, APC-driven segment of the open access economy. This geographic imbalance is a necessary consideration when evaluating the “success” and true scope of the open access movement.

The Volume of Content: An Alternative Measure of Market Size

While financial metrics are the most straightforward way to quantify the market, a truly authoritative assessment must also consider the raw volume of scholarly content now available in open access. In many ways, the sheer number of articles is a better measure of the open access movement’s success in achieving its core goal: maximizing the dissemination of knowledge. The growth in article volume reflects author behavior and policy success more purely than the fluctuating price of an APC.

The volume of open access content has surged dramatically over the last decade. As of the early 2020s, a remarkable number of scholarly articles, reviews, and conference papers were being published under some form of open access. In fact, estimates suggest that the total number of scholarly articles with any form of open access now accounts for well over 50% of all academic articles published globally each year. This is a monumental tipping point. The Gold Open Access segment, which directly contributes to the revenue market, has seen the number of articles published quadruple in the decade leading up to 2024, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate of approximately 16% for Gold articles.

This exponential increase in open access article volume has a massive, non-monetary value for global research. It means that researchers, clinicians, educators, policymakers, and the general public have unrestricted access to a vast and growing body of knowledge, leading to faster innovation, better-informed policy, and more rapid scientific advancement. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a comprehensive list of high-quality, peer-reviewed open access journals, now includes over one million articles, further underscoring the scale of available content. Therefore, while the revenue is a few billion dollars, the value of the knowledge unlocked is arguably incalculably greater, representing the true success of the movement in achieving its original, philanthropic goals.

Major Publishers and Their Open Access Dominance

A crucial factor in the open access market’s size is the strategic pivot by the world’s largest academic publishers, often referred to as “the Big Five.” These companies, including giants like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley, control a significant share of the scholarly publishing market, and their move into open access has been the single greatest determinant of the open access market’s current valuation. Far from being sidelined by the open access movement, they have effectively monetized it.

These publishers have not only launched hundreds of fully Gold Open Access journals but have also integrated Hybrid Open Access options across nearly their entire subscription portfolios. Their existing infrastructure, reputation, and control over high-impact journal brands enabled them to transition seamlessly and confidently, capturing a leading share of APC revenue. Springer Nature, for instance, has long been a major player in open access, and its success illustrates the potential of the model. When a publisher of this magnitude pivots, the impact on the total market is immediate and enormous, as it captures the majority of high-value APCs.

This commercial dominance creates a somewhat paradoxical situation. The open access movement was, in large part, a reaction against the profit-driven nature and high costs of these very publishers. Yet, the rapid growth and multi-billion-dollar valuation of the open access market is largely due to the successful commercialization of the Gold Open Access model by these same companies. They leveraged their market position and brand loyalty to set premium APCs, effectively trading high subscription revenue for high-APC revenue. This dynamic confirms that the financial size of the open access market is less a measure of grassroots disruption and more a reflection of the commercial sector’s strategic ability to absorb and monetize a new publishing paradigm.

Emerging Challenges and Opportunities in the Open Access Market

The open access market, for all its explosive growth, is not without significant challenges and opportunities that will determine its future size and shape. One of the most persistent and thorny issues is the equity problem and the high cost of APCs. As mentioned, the soaring prices of APCs, especially for top-tier journals, create a financial barrier for unfunded researchers, early-career academics, and those in low-income regions. This challenge is being actively addressed through more sophisticated waiver programs, geographic pricing, and the rise of institutionally supported Diamond Open Access models that eliminate APCs altogether.

Another critical challenge that has shadowed the growth of the open access market is the proliferation of predatory journals. The “author-pays” model, decoupled from the strict quality controls of established journals, has created a lucrative opportunity for unscrupulous entities. These predatory journals charge fees but provide little to no legitimate peer review or editorial oversight, damaging the scientific record and the reputations of unsuspecting authors. The market size figures are difficult to disaggregate from the revenue generated by these unethical actors, making the issue a real concern for the quality of the open access content landscape. Vigilance and platforms like the DOAJ are essential for authors navigating this minefield.

Looking ahead, the market is rife with opportunities. The increasing adoption of Diamond Open Access could diversify the market’s revenue streams away from APCs alone, potentially reducing overall revenue but increasing the truly “open” volume of content. Furthermore, technological innovations, particularly the application of Artificial Intelligence in peer review and editorial workflows, have the potential to significantly reduce publishing costs, which could eventually lead to lower APCs. The future size of the open access market will be defined by the successful navigation of these cost, quality, and equity challenges, likely resulting in a more diversified and geographically balanced scholarly communication ecosystem.

Conclusion

The question of the size of the open access publishing market has a clear answer: it is substantial, growing at an extraordinary pace, and fundamentally reshaping the scholarly communication industry. Massive Transformative Agreements, negotiated largely by institutions in North America and Europe, have successfully rerouted multi-million-dollar subscription budgets into the APC economy, solidifying the market’s current scale.

Beyond the dollar value, the market size is equally impressive in its output volume, with open access content, in all its forms, now accounting for well over half of the global annual scholarly output. This volume represents the true, non-monetary success of the movement: the successful democratization of access to research on a global scale. However, the market’s reliance on high APCs, captured mainly by the major commercial publishers who have strategically pivoted their business models, continues to raise serious concerns about equity for unfunded researchers and the challenge of predatory publishing. 

Moving forward, the open access market is poised for further evolution, driven by a global push toward Open Science, the increasing adoption of cost-neutral Diamond Open Access models, and technological innovation. It is a dynamic and essential component of the publishing world, confirming its status as the dominant paradigm for the future dissemination of research.

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