Reimagining Open Access: A Diverse Approach from Australia

The Open Access movement has come a long way since the Budapest Open Access Initiative principles were first released in the early 2000s. Examples of open practices began to appear worldwide and, against this background, the Australian government demonstrated a strong commitment to open research by providing support to academic institutions in a number of ways, including funding for institutional repositories empowering universities to store and share research outputs. More recently, Australia has seen a rapid adoption of transformative agreements, leading to 56 per cent of new journal articles being published as gold open access in 2023. However, while gold open access is rising, other open access pathways—such as green open access through institutional repositories—are in decline. This shift highlights a critical issue: transformative agreements alone cannot provide a viable path to making all Australian research freely available. At James Cook University (JCU), the ResearchOnline@JCU institutional repository houses metadata records of close to 60,000 research outputs going back to 2007. Some 44,000 of these records are journal articles with more than 28,000—or 63 per cent—of these outputs being locked behind a paywall. This presentation will highlight a suite of open access initiatives carried out at JCU, a research-intensive university in regional northern Australia, to bridge this gap; and share practical strategies that could be adopted by other institutions worldwide. In addition to the more conventional approaches such as negotiated publisher agreements, open access repositories, and diamond open access journals, we have successfully implemented several additional initiatives including the appointment of open access champions and green open access drives. We propose that many of these initiatives can be applied to a wide variety of institutions to advance the goal of championing a diverse open access publishing landscape Keywords: Open Access, Australia, James Cook University Library, Institutional Repository, Bibliodiversity