Thoughts on Open Access Panels – ProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"When one presenter at a recent open access panel at the American Historical Association asked the important question, “To what problem is Open Access the answer?” the first answer that came to my mind was rather simple, “My problem, and the problem faced by people whose historical work I care about: access.”Notice that this first somewhat selfish answer that popped into my head was not phrased as, “So that everyone in the world can read my obscure scholarship for free.” Of course, that is a perfectly legitimate answer, but a growing number of critical voices against open access may take the wording of this statement and insert it into a misleading binary composed of producers of research on one side and the “consumers” of a “free product” on the other. This, in turn, makes it relatively easy to perform a powerful inversion of debates on OA where strong proponents, including myself, have long argued that open access is primarily an attempt to address inequality. The inversion I have seen employed more and more often is to embrace the argument of inequality but conclude that open access is in fact a cause, and not a solution to inequality...."