Open Access News

I’m probably the wrong person to ask whether open access will fly. Still --I think the world will change in our direction. Utopia, certainly not. An entirely open-access landscape, certainly not. A world where many more people have unfettered access to much more research and scholarship --yes. I think we’ll get there. Here’s why I think that.

We have the (largely US- and Europe-based) for-profit publishers, who hate and fear open access to the point of telling flat-out lies about it. We have librarians and a few visionary researchers, who want it desperately. And we have the slumbering behemoth, the vast quantity of researchers who don’t understand the system and don’t care, but will do what they are told and act in what they perceive to be their self-interest.

The for-profit publishers are fighting on a lot of fronts right now --too many. Too much legislation and other government action in too many countries. Sure, they’ve stopped some of it; they gutted the NIH proposal. But they have to win every single fight to maintain their position without ceding anything. They can’t. This isn’t going away. Even some of their wins are turning out rather Pyrrhic --the NIH victory was a dagger in the heart of open-access policy based on voluntary action by researchers.

One big legislative win in a developed country will blow this wide open, I firmly believe. I can’t predict when that win will happen, because that’s like predicting lightning --but I’d be honestly shocked to see nothing pass in the US or Western Europe within ten years. The big publishers simply aren’t an important enough lobby to stop it --especially when the arguments (and, to be blunt, the lies) they choose are so pitifully transparent much of the time. Nor does it help the publishers when developing nations climb on the open-access bandwagon (as they are, speedily); arguing against it paints publishers in a dreadful light indeed....

Slowly but surely, the environment is changing in an open-access direction. That’s what I see. I don’t see what can stop it. And as the environment changes, more and more researchers will make independent self-interest-based decisions to play along.

Despite our internal squabbles and frustrations --even our occasional moments of despair-- the ranks of pro-open-access librarians and researchers are growing. Even just since I started my job, which I’ve been in for less than a year, I hear more voices than I did, more inquiries, more interest. I see more experiments, more projects happening in parallel, more public statements drawing lines in the sand. This suggests to me that we’re not building air-castles here; we’re starting to envision and build the infrastructure that the changed system will require.

Our biggest stumbling-block, we both say and are told, is the slumbering behemoth: the researchers. Frankly, I think their absence from the struggle is a neutral or even slightly hopeful sign. If the slumbering behemoth were violently opposed to open access, we’d have an insuperable problem. If the slumbering behemoth had ranged itself behind the publishers, we’d be outright dead in the water.  But the slumbering behemoth slumbers on, letting us change its sleeping-space behind the scenes. The publishers daren’t disturb it --for example, by aggressively hunting down e-reserves programs or institutional repositories-- for fear that it will turn on them when it wakes. Sure, the behemoth isn’t using its current power (and it has quite a lot, in the form of unremunerated labor) to force change, nor is it actively changing. It won’t use its power to resist change, either, and I do think that may just be good enough, the way the world is moving....

Comment. Like Dorothea's Wednesday post on gatekeeping, this one was hard to excerpt; it's all so good. My reading agrees with hers. Any candid and comprehensive look at the landscape gives OA proponents grounds for hope. We have a large number of small successes, a small number of large successes, good prospects for more, good momentum, good technology, good policy arguments, good answers to the objections, and good people working hard worldwide to build the OA infrastructure. OA is far from the default today for scholarly communication, but it will be.