As anyone who has followed the story of open access will know, a multitude
of issues has arisen since the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
adopted the term in order to promote the idea of research being made freely
available on the internet. It has also led to a great deal of debate and
disagreement over the best way of making open access a reality.
However, we seem to be arriving at the point where consensus is growing in
the global North around the idea of persuading and/or forcing legacy
publishers to convert ("flip") all their journals from a subscription model
to an open access model. This is being spearheaded by the OA2020 Initiative.
One implication of this would seem to be that we can expect widespread use
of the pay-to-publish model where, instead of readers paying to access other
researchers' papers, authors will pay to publish their own papers - by means
of article-processing charges (APCs). Currently, APCs are around $3,000 a
paper, although they can be both higher and lower than this.
Researchers in the global South view a mass flipping of subscription
journals to OA with considerable concern. Since most have little or no
access to APC funding they can expect to see today's paywalls replaced by
publication walls, making it extremely difficult for them to publish in
international journals.
Leslie Chan, associate professor at the University of Toronto and Principal
Investigator of the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network
argues, "The institutions and countries adopting the OA2020 initiative
express very clearly that it is not their problem that scientists from
countries can publish or not. It is a very selfish attitude, individualistic
and even nationalistic."
By contrast, Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley's University Librarian and
Chief Digital Scholarship Officer argues that engineering a mass conversion
of subscription journals to OA is currently the only practical way of
achieving open access in the near term, and that while a global flip
presents challenges for those in the global South, the current paywall
situation for them is "awful". He adds that we cannot expect open access "to
remedy all inequities".
MacKie-Mason expands on this views in an interview here
https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from
.html
The interview invites us to ask whether a global OA solution is actually
possible. If it is not possible, then we might wonder how the BOAI's promise
that OA would enable the world to "share the learning of the rich with the
poor and the poor with the rich . and lay the foundation for uniting
humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge" can
hope to be realised.
List members are invited to comment on these issues on the interview.
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