COVID-19 and the future of open access | Samuel Moore

Excerpt:

While it may be helpful, as Gary Hall has suggested recently, to think about the pandemic as an event in which we are ‘trapped’, and which therefore resists any hasty interpretation (paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty), I do still think there is value in trying to understand the possible impact of the virus on publishing – not out of any desire for certainty but rather to make visible the uncertainty of what’s going on. And with this uncertainty, we can ask if it is possible then that both the upsurge in open practices and the freely available content made available as a result of the lockdown might help nurture a better, more open and less profiteering publishing ecosystem?

To answer this question, it is first worth noting that the freely available content made available is largely done so at the behest of publishers and often in a piecemeal fashion, rather than systematically and in collaboration with authors, research communities and librarians. Jim O’Donnell, for example, has expressed scepticism that publishers are making content available purely out of altruistic reasons and are instead hoping to ‘entice users to some products they’ve not seen before and send those users back to their librarians insisting — when the free period is over — that we absolutely must subscribe to some of them — at a moment when prospects of budget flexibility are evaporating and cancelations are looming’. Even if this isn’t the case, it is important to note that paywalls have been lifted temporarily, unilaterally and unsystematically – purely in response to a global pandemic crisis. Once this crisis has passed, or at least when publishers deem it to have passed, there is no suggestion that anything other than business as usual will return and that paywalls will be re-erected.