For Researchers in the Humanities, Is Open Really Fair? | Katina Magazine

"Over the past year, we interviewed 39 researchers in the humanities about their understanding and practices of open research. One significant finding: While they agreed, in principle, that openness is a good thing, they felt that making open research an instrument of research evaluation (i.e., open is good and not open is bad) would put them in a fragile position, as their research and publication practices do not always fit neatly onto open research templates—for example, those governing date reuse and interoperability....

An unintended consequence of the open access movement—initiated in the 1990s—is the market for article-processing charges (APCs) levied by predatory and reputable journals alike. In recent years, these charges have increased at a rate higher than inflation and have sometimes seemed to be correlated to the established prestige or impact factor of a journal. The push for openness prompted transformative agreements (also known as transitional or read-and-publish agreements), which can only be afforded by institutions with means. Open access has thus become a mechanism by which the affluent have more say and reach than the under-resourced, deepening the “North/South” divide and making only more urgent the subject of global inequities in knowledge production..."