[GOAL] Ownership and future of "Open access" services

[Heather Morrison]

Who owns and controls the services that Open access depends on, both now and in the future, is an important question for the sustainability of open access.

To the best of my knowledge:

Figshare is owned by Nature Publishing Group which was recently acquired by Springer. On the surface, Springer is quite friendly to open access, however I consider it important to remember that in terms of subscriptions / sales revenue and profits Springer is second only to Elsevier. Springer in turn is owned by private equity companies and had been sold 4 times in little more than a decade.

Academia.edu is privately owned. According to Wikipedia, one of the founding investors, Hoberman, made a great deal of money developing something called last-minute.com then selling the company.

I understand that this is a common strategy or trend in Information technology, developing a startup then selling the company.

I do not think it wise for OA to rely on such services. We need services such as institutional and disciplinary archives and Journal hosting services and high quality indexing services that are owned and controlled by the public (perhaps with help from stable committed not-for-profits).

best,

Heather Morrison
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