Open Access News

Although Swan's work has demonstrated the willingness of researchers to deposit articles in repositories, this has tended to be a passive rather than an active agreement, judging by the thin population of most institutional repositories. Open Access journals have also grown in numbers. In November 2005, the Directory of Open Access Journals lists almost 1900 open access journals. But open access is a long way from being at the heart of scholarly communication and is ranged against large commercial forces in the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing area; and although optimists will feel that the tide has turned on Open Access and that moves such as the much heralded but still awaited Research Councils' mandating of deposit will tip the balance, it has to be acknowledged that the UK scientific community looks more like donkeys led by lions (to paraphrase Max Hoffmann) than the reverse. The community looks remarkably unmoved by considerations of the future of scholarly communication. And yet it is common ground between at least some publishers and some proponents of open access that the present model is disintegrating and cannot survive....In sum then Open Access has made good progress (although as the mailing lists show there remains substantial confusion between the green and gold routes, between Open Access and Open Archives), but commercial STM publishing remains in rude and profitable health....Another key driver is national ambition of small countries. A number of programmes have begun in Europe in countries as disparate as the Netherlands, Portugal and Scotland, where Open Access is seen as a key element of national strategy to cover everything from the dissemination of publicly funded research to encouraging inward investment. The DARE Project in the Netherlands is the most developed of such programmes but pragmatism rather than optimism encourages one to believe that other countries will see advantage in co-ordinating and optimising the dissemination of their research....Open Access is a battle where a ragamuffin band of academics and librarians are challenging the imperial pomp of billion dollar global companies. In those terms the contest is both unequal and unwinnable, since too much inertia is built into the system. However, as this article has tried to show there are powerful drivers and change agents in place - technology; the nature of research; Google; national interest - which coupled with the sheer bloody-mindedness and persistence of the proponents of open access will lead to its growth as the dominant form of scholarly discourse.

Comment. I have only two quibbles. (1) "[T]here remains substantial confusion...between Open Access and Open Archives." This is itself an example of the confusion. OA archives are themselves OA. OA is not limited to OA journals. (2) "Open Access has made good progress...but commercial STM publishing remains in rude and profitable health." This assumes that the purpose of the OA movement is the destructive one of harming commercial publishers. It's not. The purpose of the OA movement is the constructive one of providing OA to more and more research literature. It's possible for the commercial publishers to join in this endeavor, and many of them are doing so, if not by converting non-OA journals to OA then by permitting their authors to deposit their postprints in OA repositories.