The open access movement at a crossroad: Are the big publishers and academic social media taking over?

Key points Traditionally, open access (OA) has been growing via two routes: full OA journals (gold) and open self‐archiving of manuscripts (green). Gold OA is dominated by new OA publishers (charging APCs) and society/university journals that do not. Major commercial and society publishers are increasingly moving into the APC‐funded OA market. The proliferation of big national or consortium‐level e‐licences bundling subscription and APCs for hybrid OA may lead to large‐scale flipping of journals to OA. Authors appear to be choosing social networks over repositories for ‘green’ OA sharing of articles.