In the late 1990s, there was a tsunami of utopianism as content moved into the browser. Many were swept up by a belief that digital purveyance would be so cheap as to be virtually free; that content could be liberated from containers to become ubiquitous; and that previously hidden knowledge would be unlocked to the benefit of all. The subscription model and its walls of pay were certainly doomed.

The utopia hasn’t materialized, despite major efforts and significant change. The subscription model is still prevalent, and open access (OA) continues to be a relatively minor part of the scholarly publishing economy even 20 years hence. At the recent Researcher-to-Reader (R2R) conference, the difficulty of making OA business models work in isolation was a consistent theme. Gold OA has created conformity rather than disruption, both in the pricing of services via the model but also by further entrenching the largest publishers, who are better positioned to execute on its underlying economies of scale. Author-pays has also enabled a new type of publishing scam, the so-called “predatory publishers.”

Now there may be another storm of change gathering on the horizon.

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