How to turn ‘free samples’ into ‘open access’

"About once a year Sage opens up all its content to the public — you create an account with them, logon, and download away. What’s the difference between Sage’s periodic giveaways and the AAA’s new Open Anthropology publication? Sage knows that what it’s doing is advertising, while ‘Open Anthropology’ is pretending to be an academic journal. Who could possibly be fooled into believing that Sage’s periodic ungating of its content is part of a move towards open access? The idea is ludicrous. Everyone knows that Sage is giving away free samples of its product — one of the oldest marketing techniques on the books. And I don’t mind. In fact, I usually use the opportunity to download as much of Sage’s total corpus as possible (after about 100 downloads you get an error screen telling you to wait thirty minutes and try again, btw).Sage doesn’t love me, I don’t love them, and none of us pretend otherwise."