In reply to Jan Velterop.

Jan,

I don’t disagree with your description of how movements tend to emerge and evolve. However, my concern is specifically with the open access movement. I also think it is great, by the way, that Cameron is raising these issues, and
I applaud his wish to try and grapple with them.

But let me explain my thinking in posing my question:

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 (and scholarly communication improved as a result). My view is that this is partly because they did not create an organisation or foundation under whose aegis such a process could take place. As a consequence, the OA movement has often been little more than a disparate group of self-appointed legislators shouting at each other from their different silos, along with a growing number of for-profit and non-profit publishers whose primary goal has been to generate revenues, rather than re-imagine scholarly communication (PLOS aside perhaps).

Importantly, OA advocates never convinced the wider research community that open access is something they should welcome or adopt. Having failed to do this, they turned to institutions and funders and set about persuading them that they should *compel* researchers to embrace OA. They have been reasonably successful in this process of persuasion but, so far, with very mixed results.

Consequently we have ended up with a business model (pay-to-publish gold OA) that (as is becoming increasingly evident) makes little sense to anyone but publishers, and an alternative strategy (green OA) that looks set to create a fair degree of chaos, while further oppressing and alienating
researchers — not least by increasing the level of micromanagement that they are subject to (particularly under the HEFCE model). Moreover, this process will
by and large be controlled by professional managers who know little or nothing about research, and in many cases do not appear to particularly value it.

In short, gold OA is in the process of being captured by legacy publishers and green OA is being captured by technocrats. Amongst other things, this is seeing an outdated model of scholarly communication (the journal) persist, and the purpose and value of research lost sight of. And it is going to take a great deal of effort to break the grip of these two powerful forces in order to move forward.

Given this, I think it makes sense to ask the question I did alongside the questions posed by Cameron, if only to try and better understand why we are where we are today, and how attempts to improve scholarly communication could
be better tackled going forward.

In my view, the first step should be to try and get the wider research community involved in the discussions (not just interested parties), and to seek to convince them of the need for change. How one does this is the biggest challenge. I also think it would be ill-advised to try and force change on them again. And it is surely a discussion that ought to take place without the involvement of publishers.