The APE lecture: Life in a liminal space; Or, the journey shapes the destination

This paper is based on a presentation at the APE 2022 Conference and two blog posts published first on The Scholarly Kitchen. It explains how the scholarly community is currently in a liminal space; a place of transition to the end goal of open access (OA), open science, and open research. It argues that the publishing landscape is marked by two waves of consolidation: in the journal’s publisher space, and in the scholarly communication infrastructure. With respect to the first wave, Uncertainty, Transformative Agreements, and the required Technology and Reporting Burdens of Plan S led to an increased emphasis on publishing in quantity, smaller society publishers being dissolved, and bigger publishers shifting towards being workflow providers. The second wave of consolidation is happening around the technology and infrastructure of scholarly communication. This has seen a further shift for many companies away from being a publisher and toward being a workflow provider. The short-term outlook is that we are going to be in this liminal space for a while. Longer term we see two concurrent trends: a drive for low-cost, high-volume bulk publishing, and a shift for publishers to become paid service providers for most everything else. This is the path we are on. The question for the community is whether this is an acceptable long-term outcome to our end goal, or are there other routes we should be taking to drive a differently shaped future?