Open access movement – from advocacy to policy to practice?

“Discussions around open access and various forms of open access have been on the agenda in a number of academic debates lately. Paraphrasing the developments in the Arab world, the movement was termed the ‘academic spring’ in a number of Guardian articles. While the debate on open access is not new, having also been featured here on the Hedda blog a while ago, the topic gained momentum in early 2012, when Tim Gowers, a renowned Cambridge mathematician wrote a blog entry about Elsevier and the practices about pricing and peer reviewing. Quickly picked up by a number of publications, including The Economist, this started up a heated campaign and a boycott by a number of academics world wide. On the website The Cost of Knowledge, more than 12 000 academics signed the petition of boycotting all journals by Elsevier. Newspapers such as the Guardians have given the topic a lot of news coverage as well, in many ways becoming a part of and driving the campaign. However, there are strong business interest in play. The Guardian reports that subscriptions to journals and publishers cost almost one tenth of the basic operating costs of universities in the UK. Michael Taylorgave some interesting numbers to back this in his commentary in The Scientist. For example, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 37,3 in 2011 (in essence over €950 million in revenue), far exceeding the profit margin percentages of for example Apple – being therefore called the “most ruthless capitalists”. In essence it is almost a risk free enterprise with huge profit margins to all of the three major actors – Elsevier, Springer and Wiley – and as long as the academia is dependent on reputation and publication indexes in the high ranked journals, there seems to be continued demand... However, the open access movement has now gained support also on the policy level, and in the new EU framework programme Horizon 2020, open access is a central aim, with about €80 billion available for funding, and Times Higher Education referred to a Commission official who stated that ‘open access will be  the norm’. The article further quoted Stephen Curry, a open access advocate and professor of biology, who saw the movement as a part of a larger shift: ‘This is part of a bigger and growing picture. If you see the funders falling into line and adopting consistent policies with each other, that sends a clear signal that this is just the way we do research...’”