FINAL STATEMENT
17th Berlin Open Access Conference
B17 brought together over 150 representatives from academic and research institutions, national negotiation teams, and research funding organizations spanning more than 40 countries and all continents. The following statement represents the strong consensus of all delegations present at the meeting.
The global transition to open access publishing continues to evolve, with research communities worldwide making steady progress in converting subscription-based financial streams into support for open access and empowering their authors to choose a CC license for their journal articles. Our efforts encompass both ongoing publisher negotiations and the commitment to supporting new and improved forms of open access publishing, in line with the OA2020 Expression of Interest, nurturing community-driven initiatives and scholarly publishing in local languages and contexts relevant to specific research communities.
As open access publishing grows, concerns about sustainability inevitably arise, particularly as the volume of research outputs expands, driven by complex factors both within and outside the academy. To ensure this growth is a positive force for the advancement of scholarship, our efforts remain steadfastly focused on sustainable models that preserve the integrity and accessibility of scholarly communication.
Building on the groundwork laid by earlier transformative agreements, and recognizing the expanding role of librarians as both stewards of knowledge and essential partners in empowering authors to openly share their research, we are committed to continuously refining open access models and strengthening negotiation objectives to ensure agreements evolve in line with the academy’s priorities. As this transformation continues, our community will work with publishers to meet the diverse needs of the global research ecosystem, with a continued focus on the key priorities outlined in the B16 Final Statement: tackling inequities, ensuring academic self-governance, and upholding author rights.
Reaffirming those priorities and expanding our focus, we set forth the following objectives to guide the next phase of publisher negotiations toward an open scholarly communication paradigm.
1 Academy control: All pathways to open access make valuable contributions towards ensuring the progress of scholarship, impact for society and academy control over the research literature. We reaffirm that on the pathway of publisher-provided, journal-based scholarly publishing, returning control to the academy means an open publication to which an author retains copyright, accompanied by a CC BY license that allows the academy and the public to most fully benefit from the research. We reject any claim to exclusive rights over research articles and related outputs (data, code, preprint, peer review reports, etc.)
2 Academic use of computational research methods: Computational research methodologies, such as text and data mining (TDM) and artificial intelligence (AI), are integral to modern scholarship. It is scholars, not publishers, who should determine which methodologies best advance their ability to investigate, analyze, and generate new knowledge. Application of a CC BY license ensures that scholarly literature and associated outputs contribute to a globally accessible and robust corpus of knowledge for computational research, allowing the academy to fully harness this potential rather than relinquishing control to commercial entities.
3 Transparency: A rapid transition to open access requires that all stakeholders have full visibility into the data necessary to steward this shift and prepare for a future where financial flows equitably support the needs of authors and the research community. We call on publishers to collaborate with the research community to enable the full opening of research information, as described in the Barcelona Declaration. Only with full transparency around publication data, publication ethics and quality assurance standards, and pricing—including information on waivers, discounts, and the impacts of geopricing—can the global research community assess progress, ensure accountability, and cultivate a fair and sustainable open scholarly publishing ecosystem.
4 Fair investment realignment: We have made significant strides in dismantling the mechanisms that allow publishers to profit multiple times on the same journal content—through opaque subscription pricing, additive payments by libraries and authors (subscriptions and uncontrolled hybrid APCs), and the exploitation of exclusive copyright—but the transition to open access publishing must go further to guarantee that financial resources are directed toward fostering an inclusive and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem, rather than disproportionately feeding publisher profit margins. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that financial barriers never determine who can publish and that investments in scholarly publishing are fair, transparent, and structured to sustain an open and inclusive publishing environment. As institutions shift their financial commitments from subscriptions to open access, publishers must adapt their pricing structures accordingly. In many cases, this means reducing historical revenue levels to achieve a fairer distribution of publishing costs. At the same time, institutions with high research output must have the confidence that their investments reflect the true cost of responsible open access publishing—grounded in transparency and inclusivity rather than entrenched profit expectations.