On Allington on Open Access - uncomputing

"Daniel Allington has written the best thing I’ve yet read anywhere on open access, called “On Open Access, and Why It’s Not the Answer.” Anyone interested in the question should read it now. It is much more deep and detailed than most of the pro-OA writing out there, and gets at some of the deep political and academic problems that lurk around the stark moralistic rhetoric that informs most discussions of the topic ... I wrote a comment on Allington’s blog to emphasize and expand upon a couple of his key points; it’s reproduced here ... 1) Publicity. One of the main functions of publishers is to publicize (as the name suggests) our work ... Along with sustainability, this is one of the things funded publishers can and do offer that completely gratis operations can’t and don’t ...  2) Discipline Specificity. The blanket injunctions regarding OA completely overlook the tremendous differences in costs from one discipline to another. As Hal Abelson said in the Swartz report from MIT, the entire JSTOR back and current catalog (mostly humanities and social sciences journals from hundreds of publishers) costs less than the current journal subscription from some individual science publishers (such as Elsevier). If a main part of the pro-OA argument is the cost of journals, then it must take into account the fact that journal costs are radically different across disciplines, as you suggest. 3) Emotion/moral argument ...  There is cognitive dissonance. OA is easily seen, especially in the humanities because of #2 above, and visible in quite a bit of the rhetoric you quote, as a rejection of humanistic academic practice, not as support for it. Keeping these contradictions in mind is hard and produces extra emotion ... 4) Mandates. You get near this a couple of times, but there is a tremendous contradiction in the fact that for the first time I’m aware of in history, under the banner of ‘open’ and ‘free,’ academics are being told where and how they can and should publish and not publish ... 5) Libraries. The sharp edge of the OA knife is a Manichean distinction between 'open' and 'closed.' Anything not freely available on the web is 'closed.' This is an amazing reinterpretation of the function of libraries, which have until now been seen as open institutions that provide largely free access to all sorts of published material, and still do. The fact that an article is available for a fee on the web, but for free in nearby libraries, still makes it count as 'closed.' That disparages libraries (and is partly responsible for another anti-intellectual push toward putting them out of business) and turns the facts of the world upside-down. If the price of access is a trip to the local library, I don’t see why that is unreasonable. At all ... 6) The Reinterpretation of Publishing. In history, publishing has been about making things open and available, through not just printing but publicity, distribution, editing, and so on. Now we have book historians as wise as Darnton reinterpreting publishing itself as a means of preventing rather than providing access. That is really bizarre. 'Paywalls' do not prevent access. Stephen King fans are not 'prevented' from reading his books because they cost money. This just turns obvious facts on their head.  7) Access for the Disadvantaged. Many publishers and distributors have robust programs to deal with this. 8) The Slippery Target of OA. The best arguments for OA focus on academic journal articles because they have traditionally been contributed without compensation. Yet many of the most rabid OA supporters go much further, beyond the Budapest OAI recommendations, and start to talk about mandated OA for all sorts of other things up to and including 'everything professors publish.' The fervor with which this position is sometimes recommended (see: the recent AHA Electronic Thesis controversy) also smacks to me of cognitive dissonance, because depriving professors of the opportunity to earn money for their own creative and scholarly productions is one of the best ways to eviscerate what is left of the professiorate."