Open Access: What You Need To Know Now By Walt Crawford

Sometimes we Open Access advocates tend to assume everybody is already on our side. You know, all our librarian and scientist colleagues out there. Surely by now they’ve seen the light. They understand the main issues and flavours of OA, can ably summarize the major arguments for OA and refute the major complaints against.

Of course, reality is a lot more complicated than my dreamy, unrealistic wishes.

Convincing librarians to support Open Access, either directly or indirectly, is usually fairly easy but even we have a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings about what OA really means. After all, the legacy scholarly publishing system is one in which we have a defined role, one that we see as honourable and necessary. We like to see ourselves as battling evil publishers to provide access to our lily white patrons...