17th BERLIN OPEN ACCESS CONFERENCE
MOVING OA FORWARD
FROM TRANSFORMATION TO COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
5–6 February 2025, Harnack House, Berlin, Germany
Scientists and scholars, policy-makers and practitioners, students and citizens everywhere have more free access to the latest results of research than ever before, driven largely by institutions negotiating transformative open publishing agreements (TAs) as part of their broader open access strategies. By placing the rights of authors at the forefront of their contractual relations with academic publishers, the research community has triggered a paradigm shift in science communication and taken a decisive step toward making the scientific process more transparent and inclusive.
This transformative reorientation has enabled the research community to finally uncover the profound financial inequities of the subscription-dominated system in scholarly journal publishing: while nearly 50% of new peer-reviewed articles are now published open access, 80% of publisher revenues, by contrast, still arise from opaque subscription fees. In an era where AI technologies are rapidly reshaping research, it is urgent that institutions leverage open access to protect their work from being further commodified while preserving author rights.
Yet while the constructive impact of transformative agreements has resulted in an unprecedented increase in openly published articles and significant cost savings (e.g. here and here), in parallel, growth in open access publishing based on author-facing fees outside of institutional stewardship risks undermining the research community’s vision for equitable participation in knowledge sharing through open access. This underscores the pressing need for publisher accountability in embracing the principles and values of open access and collective responsibility in implementing immediate and long-term structural changes in the funding and open dissemination of research outputs.
Amid ongoing efforts to enhance public access to research and advance open science, the 17th Berlin Open Access Conference (B17) serves as a vital forum for the global research community to renew its collective priorities and goals in open access negotiations and define concrete actions that will drive OA forward. National delegations, including key representatives from academic and research institutions and their negotiation teams, will engage in discussions on pressing topics such as author rights, equity, research integrity, and more.
B17 is organized by the OA2020 Initiative on behalf of the Max Planck Society. Outcomes of the conference will be posted on this page for the wider research community.
