What does open access publishing mean to you?

Open Access is now part of our everyday life, it is inseparable from being a librarian, especially if someone is in a decision-making position as I have been since 2015.

Librarians truly care about the original aims of the OA movement, and they understand that researchers just want their article published! OA still has to make steps to ensure it works mutually well for the goals of the libraries, subscribing institutions and the publishers.

I am definitely an OA advocate! As a librarian we work for the public and libraries should be the most open and democratic institutions which are ready to help both readers and researchers. Libraries have to keep building huge repositories to provide open access articles – and publishers need to keep building extra services to support us.

How do you think open access is changing the publishing and research industry?

There are many reasons for the movement to open access, but I would like to believe it is because the decision-makers and politicians realized it is nonsense that funded research is not transparent.

Open access is a huge benefit and transformative contracts have many new initiatives which need to constantly improve and grow. Research impact is complex and depends on many things such as language and institutional status - but independent statistics show that OA research has a greater impact due to discoverability.

Publishing is a must for scholars and scientists - Publish or Perish! More people can access OA articles either via the original OA (or hybrid) journal or via a repository. It is like a championship, there are always winners and losers. I think the development of the process will stop if publishers don’t become fully OA. Institutions and researchers have to weigh up APCs and subscription costs alongside the need to publish more and more articles.

What are some of the challenges around open access publishing?

In a small country like Hungary, it is difficult to get funding for publishing. The main problem faced by small countries is the danger of losing their native professional language. Scholars and scientists are more willing to publish in world-famous top-tier journals – and that means in English.  It would be good to have a Hungarian national OA initiative or policy, with clear benefits for Hungarians to publish OA.

One of my OA concerns is that among the general public it is thought that OA is free. But if you get something for free it can also lose its value.

OA means lots of new duties for librarians, e.g. repositories, DOI numbers, Open Journals System, new librarian roles like OA responsibility, etc. Librarians get enormous help from publishers. But currently, the problem is that there are too many different publishers, systems, platforms, and dashboards and librarians need to know about all of them.

The biggest challenge facing OA is not to forget the original democratic aims. Publishers need to look at the balance between subscription and publishing. OA will be sustainable because authors have to publish otherwise they cannot further their careers! However so much is published it is hard to keep well informed within a discipline - so the quantity of publishing should not be used for ranking – but quality.