Open access publishing, where articles or monographs are free to the reader, is rapidly becoming a goal, if not yet a norm, for most publishers and, perhaps more important, for most funders of research. The transitions are happening somewhat haphazardly, and the range of implications for researchers, librarians, funders, and research evaluators have not yet been fully discussed.

I will provide a brief overview of open access, including access to data, and will discuss the problems in achieving full open access from the perspective of different fields of intellectual inquiry and of the variety of stakeholders. This will include a consideration of concerns for learned societies in terms of their incomes derived from subscriptions to their journals.

A key concern in transitioning to open access is defining the source of funding to cover open access publications. In some fields, funders will be able to provide additional resources to make the publication of research an inherent part of the research grant; in other areas this will not be true. I will discuss the implications of this type of funding gap for a range of fields of research and how the final outcomes could vary between institutions and geographic regions.

Finally, I will briefly discuss the emerging problem of the uses of impact factors in the evaluation of researchers. Open access publishing may exacerbate this problem and I will discuss the implications of that, and some possible solutions.