2023 is the 23rd anniversary of the first open repository in Australia and the 20th anniversary of the first Australian university open access policy. If we have now reached the age of maturity what have we learnt as a nation from the developments?

Major achievements have indicated that universities, particularly libraries and presses, can make major change. Nationally we seen a diversity of initiatives in open access journals, primarily humanities and social science disciplines, participation in archives such as SSRN and ArXive and a very small number of open access presses making remarkable progress. Impact has been significant. ANU Press and research content in the repository has had more than 100,000,000 views and downloads. Citation impact shows that there is a considerable increasing use of resources – particularly theses.

Read and publish agreements emerged in 2020/21 and have opened up thousands of articles each year. The benefits to academics in terms of reducing fees (APCs) and achieving administrative efficiencies are significant.

Digitisation of historic research has also opened up a wealth of research of national significance.

What are the gaps? There is a lack of effective OA discovery in the national bibliographic system, a lack of national policy and discussion about authors rights is also limited with much resting in the hands of international publishing company practices and a Copyright Act that fails to meet modern needs.

It is time to revitalise nations discussions for the next steps in OA.

1. open access
2. open social scholarship