Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing's Top Table - Ziyad Marar - The Scholarly Kitchen

"What does open access (OA) / public access (PA) mean for your business?

It’s a slowish but profound reconfiguration of the research landscape. As William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist, once put it ‘the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed’.  When it comes to gold OA there are parts of well-funded STM publishing that have gone OA already and the rest just should follow. And we are accelerating toward OA in this respect. But with social science (and the humanities), it’s a more complex story, and one that my colleagues and I don’t tire of telling. For instance, the National Science Foundation in the US has an annual budget of $9.8B, while the Social and Behavioral Science Directorate gets $285M of that, and yet the measly political science budget of around $18M is routinely targeted by US politicians as a ‘waste of taxpayers’ dollars. You can imagine what that does for a model based primarily on APCs!

Since it is not one size fits all, I feel we need to take a lead in differentiating the OA future by subject domain. Engineering and Sociology need different things to flourish. It is true to say that the growth of national and consortial transformative agreements can give us a way to transition across all subject domains, but I suspect this will still — as the deals are renewed and assessed by the biomedical model — be challenging for social science research for reasons that lead to them being under-valued more generally...."