The Globalization and Discontents of Open Access Support

Despite the associations of Open Access with a public good,  in mass media the democratization of the access to knowledge that it  brings is vaunted in disconnection from the underlying business models  that can made it possible in the first place. The abandonment of the  subscription-based model that has long defined the strategies of large  publishers will, however, increase the dependence of the scientific  community on the government largess. For universities, the transition to  Open Access will translate not only into the re-allocation of their  funds from journal subscriptions to article processing charges (APCs),  with an uncertain effect on their budgeting, bur also into the potential  instability of the eventual business model, especially for scientific  fields heavily dependent on the research output publication subventions  that government-funded bodies provide. 

While the number of academic publications in Open Access have recently crossed the number of 60 million, according to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine,  Open Access advocates, e.g., Peter Suber who has been among the  masterminds of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, admit that the  limitations of Open Access as a model lie in its dependence on financial  incentives that external funders and universities have to provide, if  the subscription-based business models are to be exchanged for their  Open Access counterparts. While universities increasingly mandate the  deposition of scientific output into institutional repositories, which  de facto lays a foundation for Open Access in science, the universality  of the recognition that Open Access is to become a standard for  scholarly publications is far from achieved, however. 

[This is an abridged version of the blog article originally published at OpenScience.com blog.  Featured Image Credits: Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: P-40 Warhawk, SR-71  Blackbird, Naval Aircraft Factory N3N seaplane, Space Shuttle  Enterprise, May 24, 2011 | © Courtesy of Chris Devers. ]