Guest Post:  This Open Access Week Theme Has a Distinguished History - The Scholarly Kitchen

'Open Access (OA) is the blatantly excellent idea that publicly funded research should be free to read and use by anyone. It has clear benefits for academics, for innovation, and for the public. But the OA movement has been misled by commercial interests, and misused for malevolent purposes such as predatory publishing.

This predicament has created an unhelpful divide. Some of those who notice the problems with OA wonder if its advocates are all hopelessly naïve. Conversely, some of those who observe the clear benefits of OA dismiss the problem-pointers as merely cynical or in the pocket of commercial interests. But these are thin caricatures, and we can do better.

That’s why I like this year’s Open Access Week theme, “community over commercialization”. It aims to “prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.”'