I wrote a post earlier on the open access. After writing that post I am not sure I truly appreciated what the open movement is about. The open movement has been talked about in various places over the years. Even just googling “open movement” results in various articles, blogs, presentations, studies, and more in the past decade: one, two, three, four, five, etc. The open movement is not one thing. There are a variety of open movements:
- Open Access
- Open Data
- Open Educational Resources (OER)
- Open Government
- Open Source
- Open Textbooks
- Open Science
- Open … you get the idea
It would be rather redundant for me to give a rehash of what others have said for years, but there lies a conversation that is only just arising.
Imagine if you will a company that has a business model where you create a product. And that same product attracts the interest of a private sector corporation through a review process where a deal is struck where the corporation will host your product and cover associated fees in getting the product off the ground. However, the deal imposes that some or all rights to the product with the promise to host and handle the product deemed worthy of being a part of a huge array of other products. Also at least once a year you and your colleagues must voluntarily give your time to review similar products every year for the corporation and at no cost to them. Additionally, once you sign your product hidden to the public’s eye unless an individual/institution pays to see it (where some of these products are created because of public money being used). Any money generated also goes to the corporation. This happens on a yearly occurrence and thousands attempt to have their product reviewed with few selected. This is the archaic system in which publishing in academia and industry currently stands. To a non-academic this must be insane to consider doing. But what can be done about it?
There is a response being done by European countries such as Germany where this past year many universities refused to pay yearly fees on accessing the Elsevier publisher journals in January 2018. The reason behind this refusal to pay is the access model imposed by these big publishers in general. Around February 2018, the publisher caved and allowed access to their journals for the universities. It is not surprising because in the above “business model” the publisher losing all who would submit papers/articles to them plus universities not paying their fees means major money loss. Academics are the powerhouse to their success and without them they lose almost the entirety of their business. Nowadays you are seeing publishers try to make open access a profitable business when the idea open access is:
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
To think that the idea of “open” anything started with the inception of the internet and losing access to digital texts and data of all kinds. Today, a lot of scholarly work is hidden behind a paywall and it is up to my generation of academics, teachers, professors and long with veteran professors to drive this change in all disciplines.
Now this is part of the post where I get to show my university some love. Virginia Tech is committed to engaging in the open access initiative that is happening across many universities across the globe. There is a blog maintained by multiple Virginia Tech faculty and staff where many resources and workshops on the open movement have occurred. To see such drive from my university inspires me that we as academics can make this change happen.
Lastly, the Directory of Open Access Journals is a great start pushing quality work out with free access.
Thanks for reading,
Tim