In Defense of Pluralism and Diversity: A Modest Manifesto for the Future of Scholarly Communication (Part 2 of 2) - The Scholarly Kitchen

"While I have never been opposed to open access (OA) itself, for many years I’ve felt that one fundamental problem with the OA movement is that it’s built on a false premise: the idea that it is unacceptable for anyone to have to pay for access to the published products of scholarly and scientific work. Over the past 25 years, as OA has grown and as funding and distribution models to support it have proliferated, this assumption – and the corresponding belief that a transition to universal, mandatory OA is a moral imperative – has received little critical scrutiny. And yet it has also become clear that every model of OA publishing creates a mix of solutions and new problems; there is no model of openness that does not yield a mix of good and bad outcomes in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, and equity....

Since, in my view, it is a mistaken premise that all scholarly publishing must be OA, I would like to propose a more complex and (I believe) more valid set of premises for moving forward with scholarly communication:..."