Open Access: The Good, The Not So Bad and The Ugly? « Infokelele

“In May and June 2012, two significant Open Access recommendations came hot on the heels of one another. Many people may not have noticed. Industry insiders however took note.  The first was the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and the Publishers Association’s joint report titled “The potential effect of making journals free after a six month embargo’’. The report warned quite unflinchingly that only 1 out of 2 journal subscriptions currently would survive a six month Open Access embargo mandate.  The picture above fits like a T for Scientific, Technical and Medical publications according to this report. Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences publications would suffer even worse. They would retain only about 3 out of their 10 current subscriptions...  The ALPSP/AP report essentially took a cynical stand on the long term reliability of institutional repositories. Open Access enthusiasts ... did not take this lying down...  Predictably, they cast the publisher’s group as self-serving interested only in defending their status quo of higher profits and low marginal costs.  The second set of recommendations came from the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings otherwise known as the Finch report. This report underlined the potential social, economic and political benefits of expanding Open Access such as enhanced transparency in governance, more room for economic growth and increased public returns on research investments. It also enumerated the obstacles that impede Open Access’ adoption chief of which is the competing and sometimes deep conflicting interests of the different stakeholders. These mostly revolve around competing interpretations about costs, revenues, value and quality... Some in the Open Access movement have dismissed the Finch report as a diplomatic maneuver that could postpone or create systemic delays in the current momentum towards Open Access adoption... Others have seen it as being too lenient to the for-profit journal publishing industry! ... others have viewed it as either too broad or too accomodating of the different stakeholders with the potential for decision paralysis...  The Research Councils UK (RCUK) apparently reacting to the report ... has updated its Open Access policies. Under the new policies, RCUK’s funded peer reviewed research papers must provide information on how to access the underlying research data ...The works must also be licensed to allow for use and re-use including for commercial purposes where publishers have been paid through article processing charges.  Additionally, the RCUK appeared to have taken a markedly different stand from the main recommendations of the Finch Report ... While the Finch report favors Open Access through peer reviewed journals ... the RCUK prioritizes access through institutional repositories  RCUK has a blog at http://blogs.rcuk.ac.uk/ for those interested in understanding more...  What I... find missing in these reports is the broadband question which needs to be a key supporting pillar of the Open Access equation. The reports assume that there is already a widespread global information infrastructure that would support public information access. This is simply not the case for any given country. For many countries broadband has been strongly associated with significant growth in national GDPs and anecdotally with bridging of income inequalities. Without affordable broadband Internet access, Open Access will not deliver fully on its social, economic and political promises...”