[GOAL] One way to expand the OA movement: be more inclusive

[Heather Morrison]

What if, instead of condemning the many people who are doing their best to provide the most open access they feel they can, the OA movement were to be more inclusive? For example, DOAJ excludes journals that make their work freely available after one or two years' embargo. I realize and agree that we want immediate OA, but the vast majority of such journals are published by people who are completely in favour of open access but just haven't figured out how to make the economics work for them. 

The opposite of open access is closed access. The Big Chill report on the silencing of federal scientists in Canada is a good illustration. Excerpt: "the survey [of Canadian federal scientists] ...found that nearly one-quarter (24%) of respondents had been directly asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons and that over one-third (37%) had been prevented in the past five years from responding to questions from the public and media" from: http://www.pipsc.ca/portal/page/portal/website/issues/science/bigchill

I understand that the U.S. has had similar problems with political interference with science, e.g. states such as Florida having legislature forbidding reference to climate change (example here: http://fcir.org/2015/03/08/in-florida-officials-ban-term-climate-change/)

Even without any political interference, works under toll access can be locked down for the full term of copyright. In the U.S. that's life of the author plus 70 years. If a work is written 30 years before an author dies, that's a century. The great many works freely available within a year or a few of publication should be understood as a huge success, not a failure. 

If the OA movement consists of the small group of people who have been to meetings in Budapest [sometimes people on this list talk as if this were the case],  that's a small movement indeed and not likely to grow very much. On the other hand, if the OA movement is seen as the millions of authors who have provided free access to their own work (however they did this), the thousands of journals providing free access (whether we think they are perfect in this or not), the thousands of repositories - that's a huge global movement, one that we can build upon to continue and grow the momentum to date. 

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca