In reply to Richard Poynder.

Richard, you say:

"OA advocates never satisfactorily resolved the many contradictions and disagreements that have always existed within the movement, and so they never adequately thought through how their goal would best be achieved"

Given that 'OA advocates' are not, and never were, an organised group, I wonder how 'satisfactorily resolving' issues could work. It is a movement; not a political party (and those are not necessarily capable of resolving issues unambiguously, either, as current events show). The only thing that makes 'OA advocates' into what might be perceived as a 'group' is the shared conviction that OA is good for science. Opinions differ, and always have, right from the beginning, about how OA should be achieved, and it could hardly be otherwise. The definition of open access, as given in the BOAI, is not accepted by everyone, and imposition of an orthodoxy by some sort of formal OA organisation is impossible, and, in my view, not even desirable.

You also say:
"OA advocates never convinced the wider research community that open access is something they should welcome or adopt."

I think you are wrong. The scientific community at large does welcome unencumbered access to the journal literature they want and need. The thing is that for many it simply looks like that anyway, because the institutional library provides that. At a large cost which is totally invisible to most researchers. They may hear about it, read about it, but they don't 'feel' the cost, as libraries – especially in OECD countries – simply still, somehow, provide access to the bulk of what researchers need. In the light of a legacy of not being confronted with any cost of access, the cost of publishing with OA, very visible for researchers as a result of APCs, meets with resistance, and that is understandable.

I'm no fan of mandates per se, but I do believe in the merits of clear and fair contracts, and I see the funders' and governments' efforts to achieve OA in those terms. They provide grant money, they expect deliverables, and because they value OA, they include that in the desirable deliverables and are willing to include reasonable APC costs in the grant money. APCs don't only make sense to publishers, as you state, but to funders, including government funding agencies, clearly as well.

'Green' OA as well as 'gold' OA have their problems, to be sure. But by and large, APC-supported OA is successful (unless you define 'success' as 'universally implemented'). Cultural habits change slowly, on the whole, and perhaps especially in science, where publishing is an entanglement of scholarly communication and career advancement and competition. If any step should be taken first, it is to seek to convince the scientific community that 'communication' and 'evaluation for career or prestige purposes' should be disentangled and not be conflated in a single system of journal publishing. So-called 'preprint' platforms (for which we really need to find another name, as there is hardly anything 'pre-print' about them anymore) indicate a way forward, and so-called 'mega' journals possibly as well. The biggest gain of a disentanglement is that peer review, necessary for the stratification of scientists and the literature they produce, would not be holding scientific 'communication' hostage anymore, in terms of delays, comprehensiveness and financials. If the scientific community wishes to spend unnecessarily high amounts on that stratification, so be it. They'll just have to deal with any financial constraints, but at least the free scientific discourse won't suffer.

I agree that the notion of 'journal', especially that of narrow-scope journal, has reached its sell-by date. And as for the involvement of publishers in any discussion is concerned, you are surely aware that most OA progress has actually been made by the practical efforts of entities that are commonly known as publishers, from BMC to PLOS to Hindawi to PeerJ, and many other, smaller outfits.