Open Access at a Crossroads
Every October I teach a session on finding scholarly sources, and every October the conversation drifts, inevitably, to the question a sharp undergraduate always asks: “Why is this one locked and that one free?” It is a good question, and the honest answer is that the scholarly publishing system is in the middle of a slow, contested renegotiation.
Open access was supposed to be simple. Research that is largely funded by the public should be readable by the public. In practice the movement has splintered into a confusing alphabet of green, gold, diamond and hybrid routes, each with its own economics and its own winners. Article processing charges have shifted the paywall from the reader to the author, which solves one injustice by inventing another.
Librarians sit in an unusually honest seat for watching all this. We pay the invoices, we field the complaints, and we teach the students who cannot afford either. My own modest position is that access is an information-literacy issue as much as a budget issue. A student who understands why a paper is paywalled is better equipped to find a legitimate copy, to request it through interlibrary loan, or to recognise a predatory journal when one lands in their inbox.
We are at a crossroads, and the signpost is not especially clear. But the direction of travel seems settled: toward more openness, more slowly than the idealists hoped and more quickly than the incumbents would like. I will take it.
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