Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
Abbreviation	OASPA
Formation	14 October 2008
Type	International professional association
Headquarters	Online
Membership	Scholarly open access publishers
Official languages	English
President	Caroline Sutton
Website	oaspa.org

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is an industry association which aims to promote open access publishing (also known as Gold Open Access) and to establish best practices in the field. It brings together the major open access publishers on the one hand and independent — often society- or university-based — publishers on the other, along with some hybrid open access publishers. While having started out with a focus on open access journals exclusively, it is now expanding its activities to include matters pertaining to the open access publishing of books as well.^[1]

Mission [link]

The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of open access publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines, and to advocate for Gold Open Access in general.^[2] To this end, it provides a forum for professional exchange on matters of open access publishing in scholarly contexts, it engages in standardization efforts and outreach, identifies and promotes best practices for scholarly communications by open access, and supports the continuous development of viable business and publishing models.

History [link]

With the growth of the open access movement, the interactions between different open access publishers intensified, as they met each other at a multitude of trade or scientific conferences, workshops or similar events. Yet open access publishing and its peculiarities with respect to traditional publishing or scholarly communication were rarely in the focus of such gatherings, which brought about the need for a dedicated forum. With the intention to provide that, OASPA was launched on October 14, 2008 at an "Open Access Day" celebration in London hosted by the Wellcome Trust.^[3][4][5]

Founding members [link]

Activities [link]

OASPA organizes an annual Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing dedicated to scholarly open access publishing.^[6] The conference covers the whole spectrum of open access publishing, including business models, publishing platforms, peer review modes, and distribution channels.

OASPA encourages publishers to use Creative Commons licenses, particularly the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY),^[7] which is in line with most definitions of "open", e.g. the Open Definition by the Open Knowledge Foundation.^[8] The organization also engages beyond Gold Open Access, e.g. for free access to scholarly works that have been awarded Nobel Prizes.^[9]

Members [link]

There are four types of OASPA members:^[10]

• Open access professional publishing organizations
• Open access scientist/scholar publishers
• Other organizations
• Associate (non-voting) members

Criticism [link]

Criticism has focused on OASPA's self-declared role as the "stamp of quality for open access publishing", because it is apparently at odds with OASPA's application of its own criteria for membership.^[11][12] Within the context of the ongoing debate on the relative merits of Green versus Gold open access, OASPA has also been criticized for promoting Gold in a way that may be at the expense of Green.^[13]

See also [link]

• Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers
• Association of Publishing Agencies
• Directory of Open Access Journals
• International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers
• International Publishers Association
• Periodical Publishers Association
• Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

References [link]

External links [link]

• Official website
• Video recordings from the Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing: 2009/ 2010/ 2011

• This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.