Open Access Weathers a Governmental Sea Change: 2017 in Review

"In the first few weeks of 2017, just days after President Donald Trump took office, reports emerged that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture were instructing scientists on staff not to talk to the public or the press. The reports raised serious questions among open access advocates: what does it mean to advocate for public access to publicly funded scientific research at a time when the future of public funding for science itself is in question?

Put most simply, open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to share and adapt them. Open access publishing has long been the center of a debate over the future of academic publishing: on one side of the debate sit citizen scientists, journalists, and other members of the public eager to access and use scientific research even though they can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions and don’t have institutional access to even-more-expensive online repositories. On the other, a handful of large publishers with a massive vested interest in preserving the status quo."