Open access: the whipping boy for problems in scholarly publishing

Abstract

With this paper, we hope to foster debate about the place of open access (OA) in scholarly publishing. After providing a background to OA’s development and current state, we examine some of the accusations leveled against it: that OA publishers are predatory, that OA is too expensive, and that self-depositing papers in OA repositories will bring about the end of scholarly publishing. After contextualizing each accusation, we show that they arise from problems with not only access, open or otherwise, but also the scholarly publishing system more broadly. Accordingly, we instead propose the discussions we believe the scholarly community should be having about scholarly publishing to take advantage of social and technological innovations and move it into the 21st century.