The wrong moonshot – All views are etc.

"Open access (for books anyway) has been slow to take. Currently about one percent of new scholarly books are OA, most of them presumably in the UK, where OA is often a matter of policy. That small return is based on an enormous investment of time, effort, and resources. I think it was the wrong moonshot.

What if instead of prioritizing access – the question of who (reader, author, author’s employer) pays for a book – we focused on profit? If the problem is that books and journals are too expensive, after all, then profit seems to be the culprit. But open access actually muddies this issue by lumping the commercial scholarly publishers (Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, and the like) in with the not-for-profit university presses, which are subsidized, freed of the profit motive, and typically charge much less for books and journals."