Information, Medium & Society: Nineteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

The promise of open access in the scholarly publishing community has been well known and (sometimes) appreciated for twenty years or more. As the founder and publisher of a successful scholarly publishing company and journal editor, I have been a strong advocate of publishing open access books and journals for just as long. As a publisher, I have overseen the publication of more than fifty open access scholarly books and three series devoted to developing new open access titles. I have edited four scholarly journals, each of which still publishes content under a CC license. I remain committed to the ideal of promoting and distributing scholarly research accessible to all and not hidden behind a paywall or only available at a price to readers. I also remain committed to the ideal that authors or the institutions they represent should not be charged to make their work freely available, in spite of arguments to the contrary. Open access publishing is a potentially disruptive innovation. Unfortunately, the culture of scholarly publishing, as well as the lingering hegemony of print, has proven extremely resistant to that disruption, at least among the audiences the innovation should affect: readers, scholarly communities, libraries, and academic institutions. Why? What lessons should we have learned by now? How can we act on them? This paper presents research and experience that reveals the perilous future of open access publishing, why it remains largely misunderstood by the society it would serve, and the consequences of that misunderstanding for publishers.