Monday, November 18, 2019

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

(A print version of this eBook is available here

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 Elseviers 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. Given its size and influence, UC’s decision was hailed as “a shot heard around the academic world”. 

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. 

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. But could defeat be snatched from the jaws of success?

For my take on this topic please download the attached pdf

Please note that this document is more eBook than essay. It is very long. I know, I know, people will complain, but that is what I do. 

Any brave soul willing to give it a go but who (like me) does not like to read long documents on the screen may like to print it out as a folded book. I have long used the Blue Squirrel software ClickBook to do this. Alternatively, you can print booklets directly from word processing software like Word, and I am happy to send over a Word file to anyone who would like to do that

Meanwhile, the eBook is available as a pdf file here.


Rick Anderson has published a summary of and commentary on this eBook on The Scholarly Kitchen here

A second post on The Scholarly Kitchen referencing this eBook was posted 10 days later here