Beyond Open Access: Building Justice in Scholarly Communication

Is Open Access sufficient? If we aspire to keep advancing scholarly communication, what should that future look like, who should shape it, and what will success look like? We must acknowledge the considerable work that brought scholarly communication to its current state, where Open Access appears to thrive – or not – depending one’s vista. The generations who championed Open Access never imagined it as an endpoint, or as having reached its maximum potential. Instead, it challenges us to imagine better, reach further, and push boundaries. Removing paywalls alone has not guaranteed equity. Questions of who controls scholarly infrastructure, linguistic diversity, cost distribution and how power flows throughout the system remain unresolved. True progress therefore requires us to address these structural factors directly. For this, justice must be the essential foundation of our ambition.