Is Open Access grassroots or top-down? Cambridge Open Access Week 2016 | About Hindawi

"The Open Access movement has come a long way since I started working as an Open Access journal editor in 2003: nobody then knew if OA journals would catch on or even survive, PubMed Central was still new, the first NIH and Wellcome OA policies were two years away, the Harvard mandate was still five years away. It’s a sign of how far we’ve come that this year’s Open Access Week in Cambridge debated the question, 'Is Open Access a grassroots movement or a top-down imposition?'. The panel on 26 October was organised by Hannah Haines of the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge and by Cambridge University Press (CUP), inspired by journalist Richard Poynder and an article published last year that asserted 'Open access started at the grassroots, as a bottom-up, community-driven model of open journals and repositories but today the driving forces are commercial, institutional, and political interests.'"