Unlocking Secrets: What Open Science Pioneers Wish They Knew Before Today’s Reality Hit
First, some context for my response to this excellent question: when OA was gathering steam in the early 2000s, I was skeptical. I had (and continued to have) no problem with the idea that it’s good for people to have free access to scholarly publications; who could object to that proposition, all other things being equal? The problem, of course, is that all other things are never equal. Whenever you propose to give one person the product of someone else’s work — in this case, the work of turning research results into publishable scholarly products — at no charge, it creates a troublesome question: who, if not the end user of the product, will absorb the cost of the work that produced it?
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