The open access movement promised a simple thing: research funded by the public should be readable by the public. More than twenty years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative, that promise is only half kept.
The state of play
Estimates suggest that roughly a third of newly published research is now openly available, with wide variation across disciplines and regions. Biomedicine leads; the humanities lag. The structural reasons are well documented: prestige economies, APC-based business models that shift costs rather than remove them, and evaluation systems that still reward journal brands over accessibility.
What actually moves the needle
Funder mandates with teeth — Plan S showed that compliance follows enforcement.
Institutional repositories that are genuinely easy to deposit into.
Hiring and promotion criteria that credit preprints and open data.
Access is not a feature of publishing. It is the point of publishing.
None of this is new. What is new is that the tooling, the policy landscape, and researcher expectations are finally aligned. The next decade will be decided by whether institutions treat openness as infrastructure or as marketing.