Peter Suber

This is exactly the kind of book about open access that a tenured professor at an elite university is bound to produce. That is to say, while some of the definitions of terms (green open access, libre open access, etc) are useful, and the call for freedom of access to and generation of new kinds of knowledge is pleasingly utopian, Peter Suber clearly has no real understanding of what it's like to do research as an academic without access to Harvard's resources (which is most of us).

Suber writes "academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal." (12) In the academia of 50-60 years ago, sure! Not now. Most academics in the US and the UK, and an increasing number of early-career academics elsewhere, either have non-academic jobs because of the crappy job market or work in contingent/temporary positions in academia. Those few who do have tenure-track/tenured jobs or the equivalent have increasingly heavier teaching/administrative workloads for insultingly low pay. (And often in godawful conditions! Thanks to the roof partially caving in, it literally snowed inside the building in which I work this week.) Given the workload expectations, most academics do their research for free. Suber appears not to realise this, or to realise that most non-elite educational institutions simply won't—can't—afford to pay thousands in publishing fees for faculty members who want to publish open access. And for people who need to publish in order to keep their job even though they'll get no other recompense for it, well, they're going to opt for the journal that's not going to charge them thousands of dollars.

The continuing deterioration in compensation/workplace conditions for most academics is going to have an impact on the open access movement that I think Peter Suber did not predict at all. He writes that academics give away their work for free to journals because they can afford to do so. Yet increasingly I see academics turning towards public engagement—including writing for websites, newspapers, magazines, etc—for pay because they need a side hustle to make ends meet. Their research may not be going into traditional pay-walled journals, but it is going into fora which aren't accessible to all, either. An open access movement which doesn't recognise those broader economic contexts is not going to succeed, at least not in the utopian way that Suber wants.… (mehr)