“The open-access movement needs to ensure it takes all researchers along as it matures in Australia, a national seminar has been told.

Ginny Barbour, director of Open Access Australasia and a professor at Queensland University of Technology, said the open-access movement in Australia was looking for “equity in scholarly communication”.

She told a “preview” webinar ahead of Open Access Australasia’s 2022 annual meeting that this extended beyond easier publication methods to ensuring other barriers to publication were removed. She spoke of the need, “in our regions, for journals that support Indigenous research”.

There is “a need for communities of practice as a very important way of helping people navigate the open-access landscape, which is very challenging and confusing”, she said.

Another emerging issue is that some publications that had been made free to read during the pandemic are “disappearing behind paywalls” again, she said. “The conversations are moving on in this area…If it worked for the pandemic, what does it mean for other important areas that we are facing as a society at the moment?” she asked, giving climate change as an example….”