Diversity in the Open Access Movement, Part 2: Differing Goals - The Scholarly Kitchen

"My last posting discussed the variety of definitions of Open Access (OA) currently being used within the OA community and some of the challenges created by this diversity of definitions. Today I’d like to discuss another issue around which there seems to be a significant diversity of views within the movement: that of ultimate goals.

In a recent op-ed in Nature (subscription required), Aled Edwards argues for a future in which 'all scientific results are communicated in real time, at no cost, and without restriction on use as a matter of course,' and in which 'anything that impedes the sharing of discoveries… (is) eliminated entirely,' concluding that 'we should not be satisfied with anything else.' Compare this position (immediate free access to everything, with no reuse restrictions whatsoever) with that of Robert Darnton, who has publicly argued that it’s fine for “non-commercial journals whose sole purpose is to disseminate knowledge” to “charge reasonable prices.” Both Darnton and Edwards would, I’m confident, characterize themselves as advocates for OA. But each has a very different vision of what the ultimate goals of the movement should be. And more importantly, those two visions are not just different; they’re mutually exclusive: they can’t coexist.

But the acceptability of charging for access to scholarship is only one of many dimensions along which there is significant disagreement among key players in the OA movement. There is in fact a wide variety of visions for the future within the OA community, and many of them are mutually exclusive. "