Unlocking Secrets: What Open Science Pioneers Wish They Knew Before Today’s Reality Hit
The argument that “researchers are giving the work away to publishers for free anyway, so why is it okay for publishers to sell it back to the researchers’ institutions?” was always an unserious one, rooted in ignorance of the real-world costs of scholarly publishing. The fact that some publishers were reaping big profits on the backs of libraries was, and continues to be, a serious issue — but the OA movement was explicitly not about lowering the price of access to products of research: it was, and continues to be, about doing away with price altogether. This created unavoidable structural problems for the movement. Whenever work is done, the cost of the work will either be absorbed by the workers or passed on to someone else — and if, for some reason, that someone else must not be the person who wants to read the work (or a third-party access broker like a library), then who will it be?
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