Reasoning and Interest: Clustering Open Access - LePublikateur

"The conception of an open future with scholarly publications being freely accessible, sharable, and reusable cannot be easily subsumed under a single term. That is, it can. But the term has conflicting objectives. The reasoning behind Open Access interests is diverse with two essential concepts being ‘research advancement’ and ‘economic benefit’. This article clusters stakeholders regarding their Open Access interest and reasoning, leading to the clusters a Open Access as a threat, b a pain, c the ideal Open Access, and d the exploitative Open Access. 

A Blueprint for a Range of New Products

Technically, Open Access has a clear goal. There should be no barriers for potential readers—anyone—to access a publication for free online. There is a bit of a dissonance on what precisely that means, which platforms are suitable, whether there is sufficient work undertaken for archiving open online material, and not to forget the various modes OA can have, from green to gold, platinum, or brown. Technically, however, Open Access here means: free for the reader.

However, the initial initiative behind Open Access had more in mind than just the reader (Chan et al., 2002; Herb, 2017); it was about opening up scholarly communication. The plan was not to create a blueprint for a range of new products, but to revolutionise scholarly publishing. There are many reasons why the Open Access revolution (partly) failed (Poynder, 2017; Kingsley, 2016; Ward, 2014)—inertia in research processes, budget constraints, the wariness of some stakeholders, and the capitalistic boldness of others, to name but a few. Scholarly communication still is in a power struggle (Paasi, 2015), and Open Access even risks creating new knowledge regimes (Chan, 2017). This is no news, but it’s crucial to separate the Open Accesses lest Open Access becomes a useless term that is used by too many stakeholders for too different reasons...."