Open and Shut?: Björn Brembs on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt from the introduction reads as follows: "Today, OA advocates like Taylor and Brembs believe the goal of OA should be more far-reaching and more radical [** see note at end] than first-generation advocates do. This is unsurprising: a lot has changed since the Subversive Proposal was posted, or indeed since the physics preprint server arXiv was launched (in 1991) — not least in terms of the development of the Internet and of web technologies. In addition, the Creative Commons and free and open source software movements have changed how many researchers view the way in which text, software and data ought to be used and shared. And although the BOAI definition did assume reuse for scholarly papers, it did not include data or software within its definition. By contrast, younger researchers today tend to assume that scientific information should encompass data and software as well as papers, and they believe that all three types of information should be distributed with reuse rights as the default. Another generational change is that there is much greater disenchantment with legacy publishers amongst younger activists, not least as a result of the way in which these publishers have responded to OA, seeking to derail it by lobbying against it for instance. In addition, there is now a widespread conviction that traditional measurement tools like the journal Impact Factor (IF) have been discredited (and that in any case in an online world the appropriate unit for measuring impact is the article not the journal), and that the whole system of 'journal rank' is malign. Finally, younger activists tend to assume that pre-publication peer review is probably no longer fit for purpose. For these and other reasons, Brembs argues that advocating for 'read access' alone (i.e. the ability to read information but not to mine it or to reuse it) is woefully inadequate ... So what exactly is the end point? The end point, explains Brembs, is a 'modern scholarly infrastructure' managed and controlled not by publishers, but by the research community itself. In other words, the current publisher-based system must be replaced with 'an institution-based scholarly communication system, where universal open access is an added benefit to a myriad of larger issues being solved.'  How do we arrive at this end point? Writing on his blog last year Brembs explained, 'I propose that a small set of competent and motivated libraries with large subscription budgets and substantial faculty support cooperate in taking the lead. This group of libraries would shift funds from subscriptions to investing in developing infrastructure and other components for a library-based scholarly communication system.'  In other words, the $6bn currently spent on journal subscriptions should be redirected from paying publishers and channelled into building the new infrastructure that Brembs proposes. He estimates that this could deliver savings of somewhere between 30-90% over today’s subscription costs ..."