Open Access Is Infrastructure, Not Religion

"The same thing happened with the web. It’s full of cat pages and blink tags, said the content experts. It’s a lousy formatting language, said the formatters. No one will buy things online, said the brick and mortar stores. And there were failures, some spectacular, as new business models that were native to the medium of the network were tried. But a funny thing happened in each of these cases. There was a move from religion to trend, and from trend to infrastructure. And those who sat around attacking the religion angle tended to miss the transitions the worst, whereas those who got in early on the infrastructure got the best of the situation: they got to be part of changing the system entirely, and many of them became extremely wealthy. Even companies, big ones, got in on the shift to the network, the web, open source software....That’s the transition that’s happening now in open access. It was a movement. Then it became a trend (that’s why the press is writing trend pieces, for those paying attention, not because we suddenly got Dezenhall to work for *us*). But it’s already undergoing the shift to infrastructure. Funders are starting to get that paying for permanent access is smarter than paying, over and over, for subscriptions. Universities are starting to get that asserting distribution rights increases impact. And businesses built on open models are popping up, inside big companies like Springer and Nature Publishing Group as well as in small companies like Mendeley. It’s not about religion on the OA side, or stodginess on the traditional publisher side. It’s about totally missing the transition from movement to trend, and from trend to infrastructure....And when the old guard is ready, we should welcome them. There is tremendous knowledge inside the traditional publishing industry that we don’t want to lose. And we don’t win by throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What’s wrong with the old model isn’t wrong because of bad people, or people who don’t know things...."