Open access is being increasingly thought of as inevitable and the only ethical option for publishing academic research. What I believe we will end up with eventually is a situation where nearly all new publications are open access, and a good deal of older twentieth century (and earlier) research is publicly available as well due to ongoing digitalisation and expired copyrights. In between, there will be a significant body of research kept locked away behind paywalls by publishers trying to hold on to those cash cows and the inertia copyright on a work has once granted.<p>At the same time, &#x27;piracy&#x27; on a massive scale (like Sci-Hub) will only get easier due to technological advances and increasing amounts of bandwidth available to consumers worldwide. Combine that with an utter lack of sympathy for (academic) paywalls and publishers, and a widespread believe that sharing these works is ethically just, and you have a situation that simply cannot be contained.<p>I expect that in twenty years time you will be able to download almost the complete library of published academic works from the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee — legally or illegally.<p>So publishers will have to learn to deal with this new reality and reinvent themselves in an open access world, or perish.