In my office cubicle, my woodcarving of Don Quixote sits tall on his spavined nag grasping his spear, his beard jutting proudly forward. He reminds me that I am predisposed to tilt at windmills. Sometimes I ought to lean back in my saddle with my hands folded over my paunch and survey the situation, like Sancho beside the Don.
I mean, look, I backed ebooks, didn’t I? With all my little heart and soul. And they were a big-L loser—and if I’d been smarter than I was then, I’d have known it, too; the signs were everywhere.
So I’m probably the wrong person to ask whether open access will fly. Still—I think the world will change in our direction. Utopia, certainly not. An entirely open-access landscape, certainly not. A world where many more people have unfettered access to much more research and scholarship—yes. I think we’ll get there. Here’s why I think that.
We have the (largely US- and Europe-based) for-profit publishers, who hate and fear open access to the point of telling flat-out lies about it. We have librarians and a few visionary researchers, who want it desperately. And we have the slumbering behemoth, the vast quantity of researchers who don’t understand the system and don’t care, but will do what they are told and act in what they perceive to be their self-interest.
The for-profit publishers are fighting on a lot of fronts right now—too many. Too much legislation and other government action in too many countries. Sure, they’ve stopped some of it; they gutted the NIH proposal. But they have to win every single fight to maintain their position without ceding anything. They can’t. This isn’t going away. Even some of their wins are turning out rather Pyrrhic—the NIH victory was a dagger in the heart of open-access policy based on voluntary action by researchers.
One big legislative win in a developed country will blow this wide open, I firmly believe. I can’t predict when that win will happen, because that’s like predicting lightning—but I’d be honestly shocked to see nothing pass in the US or Western Europe within ten years. The big publishers simply aren’t an important enough lobby to stop it—especially when the arguments (and, to be blunt, the lies) they choose are so pitifully transparent much of the time. Nor does it help the publishers when developing nations climb on the open-access bandwagon (as they are, speedily); arguing against it paints publishers in a dreadful light indeed.
If the legislation and the bad publicity weren’t enough, there’s the emergence of grey literature to contend with. Publishers can scorn grey-lit all they want, but their scorn hasn’t made any difference thus far, and it won’t make any difference going forward, either. A piece of the scholarly conversation is slowly moving out of their hands in a way they can’t control.
And then there’s the open-data movement. Publishers could, if they wished, keep and offer supporting data along with the articles they publish—but that’s a losing proposition economically, especially in a toll-access model and especially in the short term. That open data is an open door to open access either hasn’t registered with publishers or doesn’t strike them as a threat. They’re wrong, either way. Open data gradually insinuates many of the same people pushing open access into regular scholarly workflows. Naturally that will have impact over time.
Slowly but surely, the environment is changing in an open-access direction. That’s what I see. I don’t see what can stop it. And as the environment changes, more and more researchers will make independent self-interest–based decisions to play along.
Despite our internal squabbles and frustrations—even our occasional moments of despair—the ranks of pro-open-access librarians and researchers are growing. Even just since I started my job, which I’ve been in for less than a year, I hear more voices than I did, more inquiries, more interest. I see more experiments, more projects happening in parallel, more public statements drawing lines in the sand. This suggests to me that we’re not building air-castles here; we’re starting to envision and build the infrastructure that the changed system will require.
Our biggest stumbling-block, we both say and are told, is the slumbering behemoth: the researchers. Frankly, I think their absence from the struggle is a neutral or even slightly hopeful sign. If the slumbering behemoth were violently opposed to open access, we’d have an insuperable problem. If the slumbering behemoth had ranged itself behind the publishers, we’d be outright dead in the water.
But the slumbering behemoth slumbers on, letting us change its sleeping-space behind the scenes. The publishers daren’t disturb it—for example, by aggressively hunting down e-reserves programs or institutional repositories—for fear that it will turn on them when it wakes. Sure, the behemoth isn’t using its current power (and it has quite a lot, in the form of unremunerated labor) to force change, nor is it actively changing. It won’t use its power to resist change, either, and I do think that may just be good enough, the way the world is moving.
It’s easy to get discouraged, because this is not the kind of struggle in which David’s slingshot has much of a chance. Both the pace and the nature of this change are glacial. The nice thing about glaciers, though, is that for all their lack of speed, they get where they’re going no matter what is in their way.
So I’ll take on this windmill, trusting that even my foolish enthusiasm can’t stall the charge. The spear won’t hit tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year. Incremental rather than sweeping change. But in the long run, we’ll kill that sorry windmill giant dead.
