Open Access: “Information Wants to Be Free”?

The main points made in this document: - Internet mantras like information wants to be free misled OA advocates about what is possible in an online world. Amongst other things, these mantras led to the mistaken belief that publishing would be very much cheaper on the internet. - BOAI was intended to achieve three things: to resolve the longstanding problems of affordability, accessibility, and equity that have long dogged scholarly communication. - It now seems unlikely that the affordability and equity problems will be resolved, which will impact disproportionately negatively on those in the Global South. And if the geopolitical situation worsens,solving the accessibility problem may also prove difficult. - OA advocates overestimated the wider research community’s likely interest in open access. This led them to lobby governments and funders to insist that they force open access on their peers. This was a mistake as it opened the door to OA being captured by neoliberalism. - The goals of the OA movement are out of sync with the current economic and political environment.This is not good news for scholarly communication, for library budgets or for OA. - Populism and nationalism pose a significant threat to open access. - The pandemic looks set to wreak havoc on budgets. This is likely to be bad news for OA. - Rather than being a democratic force for good, the internet created power laws and network effects that saw neoliberalism morph into neofeudalism and paved the way for the surveillance capitalism and data extractivism that the web giants have pioneered. These negative phenomena look likely to become a feature of scholarly communication too. - Today we see a mix of incompatible strategies being pursued by libraries, funders, and OA advocates – including unbundling, transformative agreements and the adoption of publishing platforms, as well as experiments with scholar-led and “collective action” initiatives. There appears to be no coherent overarching strategy. This could have perverse effects, which has in fact been an abiding feature of OA initiatives. - OA advocates have unrealistic expectations about diamond open access and the possibility of the research community “taking back ownership” of scholarly communication. - While publicly funded OA infrastructures would be highly desirable there currently seems to be little likelihood that governments will be willing to fund them, certainly at the necessary scale and with sufficient commitment. - OA advocates have probably overplayed their claim that publishers are engaged in price gouging. Nevertheless, the industry consolidation we have seen has led to a publishing oligopoly that now dominates scientific publishing in a troubling way. And as these companies develop ever larger and more sophisticated platforms and portals, we can expect to see more worrying implications than high costs emerge. Unfortunately, governments and competition authorities currently seem either not to understand the dangers or are unwilling to act

Copyright: the immoveable barrier that open access advocates underestimated

In calling for research papers to be made freely available open access advocates promised that doing so would lead to a simpler, less costly, more democratic, and more effective scholarly communication system. To achieve their objectives they proposed two different ways of providing open access: green OA (self-archiving) and gold OA (open access publishing). However, while the OA movement has succeeded in persuading research institutions and funders of the merits of open access, it has failed to win the hearts and minds of most researchers. More importantly, it is not achieving its objectives. There are various reasons for this, but above all it is because OA advocates underestimated the extent to which copyright would subvert their cause. That is the argument I make in the text below, and I include a personal case study that demonstrates the kind of problems copyright poses for open access. I also argue that in underestimating the extent to which copyright would be a barrier to their objectives, OA advocates have enabled legacy publishers to appropriate the movement for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of the research community, and to pervert both the practice and the concept of open access

Open access: Could defeat be snatched from the jaws of victory?

When news broke early in 2019 that the University of California had walked away from licensing negotiations with the world’s largest scholarly publisher (Elsevier), a wave of triumphalism spread through the OA Twittersphere. The talks had collapsed because of Elsevier’s failure to offer UC what it demanded: a new-style Big Deal in which the university got access to all of Elsevier’s paywalled content plus OA publishing rights for all UC authors – what UC refers to as a “Read and Publish” agreement. In addition, UC wanted Elsevier to provide this at a reduced cost.1 Given its size and influence, UC’s decision was hailed as “a shot heard around the academic world”.2 The news had added piquancy coming as it did in the wake of a radical new European OA initiative called Plan S. Proposed in 2018 by a group of European funders calling themselves cOAlition S, the aim of Plan S is to make all publicly funded research open access by 2021.3 Buoyed up by these two developments open access advocates concluded that – 17 years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) – the goal of universal (or near-universal) open access is finally within reach. Or as the Berkeley librarian who led the UC negotiations put it, “a tipping point” has been reached.4 But could defeat be snatched from the jaws of success? Contents: In the way of background • Pushback/ counterrevolution? • Populism and nationalism • Trade protectionism, tariffs, sanctions and suspicion • Level of naïveté • Growing gulf • Homogeneity vs heterogeneity • Wrong footed • Imbalance of values • Pandora’s Box • What is to be done? • Reaching for legal remedies • Collateral damage • Splinternet? • Overstating the situation? • Understating the situation? • What then of open access? • Open China? • Challenge for the Global South • Open access split? • East or West? • We can but hope 82 pp

Corporate social responsibility: The good, the bad and the ugly

In this article I critically analyze contemporary discourses of corporate social responsibility and related discourses of sustainability and corporate citizenship. I argue that despite their emancipatory rhetoric, discourses of corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability are defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders. I provide an alternate perspective, one that views discourses of corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability as ideological movements that are intended to legitimize and consolidate the power of large corporations. I also problematize the popular notion of organizational 'stakeholders'. I argue that stakeholder theory of the firm represents a form of stakeholder colonialism that serves to regulate the behavior of stakeholders. I conclude by discussing implications for critical management studies

OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy

When on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) published its updated Policy on Access to Research Outputs the Open Access (OA) movement greeted the news with enthusiasm. This was hardly surprising: unlike the recommendations in the controversial Finch Report (published a month earlier), RCUK stressed that it continues to view both gold OA publishing and green OA self-archiving as equal partners in any OA policy. One of the first to applaud the new policy was long-standing OA advocate, and self-styled archivangelist, Stevan Harnad. The minute the report was published a relieved Harnad began flooding mailing lists with messages congratulating RCUK on coming up with a policy that not only defied Finch, but was stronger than its current OA policy. But as Harnad set about talking up the policy, and seeking to win over sceptics and doubters, he himself began to have doubts. And eventually he was driven to the conclusion that he had no option but to withdraw his support for the RCUK policy — which he now characterises as “autistic”, and a “foolish, wasteful and counterproductive step backwards”. How has what at first sight seemed so desirable rapidly become something terrible? Curious to find out, I contacted Harnad. Below I publish the email interview that emerged from our conversation