Open access: The universal norm? | Research Information

"Such a situation, while personally troubling, highlights the importance of open access medical research. I have been blessed to easily be able to get access to much high-quality, open medical research on this condition. Patients are most empowered when they have as much information as possible about their illnesses and I feel fortunate that open access in the medical disciplines has come this far. But, of course, there is still a road to travel. I will probably become a case study since there is not much information on this condition in a non-transplant patient. But this case study might not end up being open access research. As one of my friends put it, there’s “nothing like the warm glow of knowing your health problems have contributed to a paywalled PDF” ...

But what I hope is that we find less damaging economic models than the article and book processing charges that have come to dominate. So-called “diamond” open access models, such as those that the team and I have pioneered at the Open Library of Humanities, offer equitable routes to open publishing and appear popular with academic libraries and academics. But such models are endangered by the continued dominance of massive commercial players and their transformative agreements, which threaten to consume entire library budgets in one fell swoop. 

On the one hand, I continue to feel personally opposed to the Big Business model of academic publishing in which large corporations extract massive profits and restrict the free and open flow of research. On the other hand, I am concerned by some of the austerity logics that come out of the open access movement and that devalue all publisher labour. As I wrote at the close of Open Access and the Humanities, almost a decade ago now: “Publishers perform necessary labour that must be compensated and any new system of dissemination, such as open access, will require an entity to perform this labour, even if that labour takes a different form at different levels of compensation”. Striking the right balance here through equitable economic models is the terrain on which the future battle of open access will be fought."