In this presentation I share personal reflection with regard to failures in Open Access advocacy, and draw lessons on how we could move forward based on past mistakes.

1. Open Access Advocacy: Failures
and Successes
Leslie Chan, Denisse Albornoz
Open and Collaborative Science in
Development Network
University of Toronto Scarborough
@lesliekwchan, @denalbz @ocsdnet

2. Preamble
“openness is in danger of becoming
its own enemy as it becomes an
orthodoxy difficult to question.”
Steve Song (2015)
https://manypossibilities.net/2015/01/the-future-of-
open-and-how-to-stop-it/

3. Purpose of the Session
• Share some failures from OA advocacy (largely
personal)
• Thinking differently and moving forward
• Limits of Open
• Hear your stories and strategies
• Explore ways to collaborate

5. Quick Background

8. Unequal contribution and participation in science.
Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8(3):
e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016
http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosmedicine/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiative

10. “An old tradition and a new technology have
converged to make possible an unprecedented
public good.” BOAI

11. Recommendations
• Author Self-Archiving in Open
Repository (Green OA)
• Publish in native OA Journals
(Gold OA)

12. What are the goals?
How to get there from here?
Why the “journal articles”?

13. How to measure “progress” and
“success” without a Theory of
Change?

14. Theory of Change?
Impact?

15. http://www.kintera.org/site/c.fhLOK6PELmF/b.8663719/k.8FF1/Theory_of_Change.htm

16. Successes?
Proliferation of Institutional
Repository World Wide
Proliferation of Open Access
Journals World Wide

17. Successes?
• Emergence of new “Business
Models”
• Emergence of “Mega Journals”
• Emergence of OA Policies and
Mandates

18. http://roarmap.eprints.org/

19. Liu and Li CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 109, No. 7, 10 Oct, 2015.
an annual rate of
22.4%, accounting
for 13.6% of the total
SCIE publications.

20. Fig 4. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline of Social Sciences and
Humanities, 1973–2013.
Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

21. If open access is progressing so well, why are the
same old established powers flourishing more than
ever before?
Why are the dominant commercial publishers still
making record profits, and gaining increasing share
of the total scholarly outputs?
And why are they still serving as the primary
arbiter of scientific legitimacy and academic
reputation?

22. Meanwhile
• Too caught up with licensing and “business
models”
• Can’t bring free from the “journal article” as
the primary currency of scholarly exchange
• Still added to the impact factor and journal
brands
• Forget that research is fundamentally a social
activity

23. Openness has not disrupted the current power
structure because it has been subsumed by the
dominant market ideology

24. Big publishers are much better at coordination
and at coopting Open Access as a “social
movement”
How to prevent predatory acquisition?

26. Moving Forward
• Narratives matter
• What stories do we want to tell about OA?
• Diversify the notion of success (e.g.
measurement academics, quantative of pub).
• Broadening the incentives of research
• Reclaiming the core missions of public
universities – to serve the public good

27. … Moving Forward
• Open as a process, not as a set of conditions
• Collaboration across “open” domains
• Back to the “subversive” proposal ?

28. Most Important
Let the new generation be the
driver of change

29. Your thoughts