Open Access-- Looking Ten Years Back And a Few Years Ahead

Please use the link above to access a pdf of the article published in the open access journal ‘sciecominfo - Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.’ The mission of the journal is “to [1] To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives [2] To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. [3] To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.” The journal “is an Open Access web journal covering current developments in scientific communication in the Nordic/Baltic countries and all aspects of scientific and scholarly communication...” The current article opens as follows: “I have been invited by the editor to reflect on the development of open access over the latest ten years. When writing this I am about to retire from active service at the National Library of Sweden and from my position as coordinator of the OpenAccess.se programme. The occasion makes it tempting to look back and try to draw some conclusions. My own interest in the open access issue started already in the middle of the 90-ies but became stronger around 2002. There were a number of breakthroughs during just a few years. We saw the three B-declarations - Bethesda, Budapest and Berlin - and the Open Letter from Public Library of Science. Interoperability was taken to a new level with the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The number of open access journals grew fast and commercial players entered the field. A Swedish contribution was the Directory of Open Access Journals at Lund University which was being developed from 2002, mainly with the support of the Open Society Institute but also from the National Library of Sweden. I was invited to write a chronicle for a Swedish research journal (Dagens forskning) in 2002. I wrote that ‘it is strange that universities still accept the rules of the game for the publication of scientific journals. First universities pay the salaries of their researchers as authors, reviewers and editors of these journals. No compensation is given from the publishers. Then universities via their libraries pay soaring subscription prices to get access to the same journals.’ In dialogue with the editors the chronicle was given a flashy title, ‘The system should have perished by itself ‘. My analysis at the time was that the publishing system was so absurd and irrational that it had to break down soon, now that a viable alternative was being built. The PloS Open Letter had brought the discussion to a much wider audience, in mass media and in journals like Science and Nature. Somewhat later the Berlin declaration on Open Access Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities testified to the intention of major organizations within research in Europe to work for open access. But the system did not break down in the years thereafter. We did not see a quick transition to an open access model. So had I got it wrong? Science has among its basic values not to accept something new until it is solidly proven. The tight connection between the present scientific journals and the model for career advancement is a very strong conservative force. Authors don’t lose any income in an open access model but they might feel they risk their careers... Open access has moved from a fringe discussion in smaller circles of researchers, librarians and publishers to a level where the model in principle has the support from practically all major stakeholders within research; universities, research funders and to a degree also governments. In Europe the EU early took a positive interest and gradually has strengthened its support... I think most people would agree that we need things like the following:[1] Clear and coordinated open access policies from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), research funders and governments, [2] Reliable and well presented information to researchers and other stakeholders about open access [3] An infrastructure with user-friendly and efficient services to researchers, including repositories at HEIs, national OA journals,national search service, and data centres etc [4] Economic agreements and solutions that facilitates publishing in OA journals, or at least create a ‘level playing field...’ However, there is some disagreement on whether we should stress the ‘Gold road’ or the ‘Green road’. The strategy of the OpenAccess.se is even-handed on the issue. ‘The Programme shall support both publishing in open access journals and parallel publishing in open archives. For a foreseeable future these two roads will run parallel.’ I find this the only sensible position at the present stage... as shown by Laakso et al. ... according to their estimates the share of OA articles of all articles published in peer