Open Access Movement Broadens, Moves Forward: 2014 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"It's been a mixed year for open access but we've seen some real victories and a steady march toward a comprehensive federal open access policy. We entered January with a bad taste still in our mouth: the previous month, the academic publisher Reed Elsevier sent thousands of copyright takedown notices to researchers, universities, and scholarly startups that were all hosting the researchers' own works. In doing so, the lumbering giant alienated a significant swath of its readership—who also happen to be its content providers. In the middle of the year, we heard about Colombian master's student Diego Gomez, who had uploaded a relevant paper to share with his fellow amphibian researchers. Before long, he was facing up to eight years in prison—simply for sharing an academic article. Colombia doesn't have a flexible fair use exception in its copyright law, which can be especially strict in case's like Diego's, where the paper he's accused of sharing hadn't previously been published openly online. The next stage of his trial is forthcoming. The lesson of these two developments is clear: that the open access movement cannot divorce itself from broader copyright reform ..."