Peter Suber reports how Openness advances | petermr's blog

"Peter Suber is one of my role models as one of the clearest and therefore most compelling advocate of Openness. He collects almost comprehensive information if what is happening and reports it in a compellingly simple clear manner. He is one of those people whose prose is a joy to read. Where others' thinking is muddled (or deliberately obfuscated) he cuts it apart clinically and compellingly....

He's written a review of 2010 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010, (long but compelling) and there are countless examples of organizations and people bringing in Open ideas, requirements, practices, content, tools. The involvement of governments is particularly welcome. This is mainly an account of the positive, though he also notes neutral (e.g. hybrid OA is stagnant at best [PMR – I never liked it anyway]) and some retrograde practices or vacillation of some organizations.

Without a denominator (or the true-negatives) it's difficult to give absolute numbers to the growth in OA. For example how many governments did nothing. How many Universities don't care about Openness (at least enough to spend money). And IMO Universities are the primary problem in much of this – publishers have built a 10-billion dollar market on the apathy of vice-chancellors and it's now going to be hard to pull it back...."