The Year in Open Access - a subjective review | Open ScienceOpen Science

"One of such silent but crucial point for open access was an announcement made by the European Commission in August last year. According to research, as many as half of peer reviewed articles published in 2011, were freely accessible on the Internet. Moreover, 40% of all peer reviewed papers published between 2004 and 2011 were available free of charge by then. This gave significant context to the major, widely disputed event, which followed a few months later. I am of course referring to the huge campaign on Creative Commons licenses, carried out by Elsevier, a key player in the publishing market. The thousands of takedown notices sent from the company to Academia.edu and other scientific social platforms, will surely have impacted authors’ concerns about copyright contracts. Looking at what happened, for instance, in the field of computer software and music, it is very likely that 'the take-down war' will intensify – though we already know its outcome. Scientists all over the world want to share their knowledge and they have the possibility to do so in cooperation with publishers who offer Creative Commons licenses. The case of John Bohannon (or Ocorrafoo Cobange) was also widely discussed. Some members of the scientific community concluded that this proved the fallibility of the open access publishing model. Meanwhile, since Bohannon did not examine any control group composed of toll access journals, we can only say that he exposed the incompetence and/or bad will of some editors. In my opinion, the Nobel Prize for Randy Schekman, the eLife editor and enthusiastic promoter of open access, is good news for all of us. Shekerman recognizes, that as a recent Nobel laureate, he has the rare opportunity to reach a broad audience for the ideas he holds. His recent boycott of Cell, Nature and Science has spurred a vigorous discussion on exclusivity in the academic community ..."