“Athletes with their eyes on a gold medal know it can take years of hard work, patience, and a little bit of luck to achieve. Often, the gold is tantalizingly close but just out of reach. For many in scholarly communications, the same could be said of the path to open access (OA), where flipping a publication to gold OA remains the ultimate victory.

Having survived the budget uncertainties following the Great Recession and during the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries are no strangers to the hard work, patience, and luck needed when it comes to budget planning and pushing publishers toward OA. But will libraries ever achieve the ultimate feat of bagging gold OA for all titles in all disciplines? Open access comes at a price; a gold sweep may not be possible as many institutions continue to struggle financially with the after-effects of the pandemic and lower enrollment figures. Libraries at institutions that have recovered financially, or where enrollment numbers continue to remain strong, are still nervously monitoring an economy that has, for the last two years, continuously threatened to slip into recession. And as more publishers successfully transition their revenue streams from annual or multiyear subscriptions to transformative OA agreements, some librarians wonder if academia will remain locked in a “different lipstick, same pig” model that does nothing to fundamentally change the way scholarly communications is dominated by a few large publishers….

Librarians and researchers are finally seeing the goals of OA mandates come to fruition en masse as transformative agreements become commonplace. Commercial publishers will undoubtedly continue to pivot sales and pricing strategies to what so far remains a profitable publishing model; market-research company Simba Information predicts that revenue from OA journals will represent 22 percent of all journal revenue by 2026. Still, as big deals become nostalgia and publishers focus their efforts on transformative agreements, many librarians remain frustrated with opaque pricing structures. cOAlition S’s newly launched Journal Comparison Service, where publishers can register and deposit price and service data, may appease those whose main argument against high profits in scholarly communications is the lack of transparency surrounding the actual publishing costs. (Two of the biggest publishers, Elsevier and Springer Nature, have so far declined to participate, and it’s unclear if pricing transparency will have any effect on where researchers choose to publish.)

The big question is what effect the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s (OSTP) August 2022 announcement, which recommended that federal agencies make the results of taxpayer-supported research publicly accessible by 2026, will have on the OA business model generally. Unlike cOAlition S’s 2018 Plan S initiative, the OSTP memo does not prescribe any particular business model, so the most profitable path will probably drive how public access is made available. For large publishers, gold OA seems to offer a source of sustainable revenue. Smaller publishers may also determine that they need to shift to gold OA to survive, even though many journals are not currently sustainable under APC models. Institutions that publish may feel further squeezed if gold OA becomes the dominant model, and may eventually need to scale back what they are willing to pay for….”