I’ve had a chance to catch up a little bit on my reading. Here are three documents that may be of interest to our community.
My apologies if these are “old news” and readers have already heard about them.
First, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report looking at how well various government agencies are doing on their mandate to provide public access to publicly funded research, along with recommendations on how they can improve this. The report is a very useful and fairly concise snapshot of a lot of not necessarily well-coordinated efforts as well as a window into commitments that these agencies are making going forward. See
https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-20-81
Second, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has issued a fairly extensively revised version of its report on PubFAIR, a framework coming out of its work on Next Generation Repositories and their role as part of a scholarly publishing system. See
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/pubfair-version-2-now-available/
Finally, there’s a rather long essay by Richard Poynder, an author and journalist that has been involved in the open access movement since the very early days, that’s very thought provoking and well worth reading. It’s a speculative examination of unexpected and unintended consequences of the open access movement, past, present and future, set in the context of geopolitical developments that include the nationalistic splintering of the internet. I suspect this will be very unpopular in some circles but in my view very much worth reading and thinking about. It’s titled “Open Access: Could Defeat Be Snatched From the Jaws of Victory?” (which I’m not sure is the best framing of the question — see the discussion on the Scholarly Kitchen Web Site at https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/11/25/the-tyranny-of-unintended-consequences-richard-poynder-on-open-access-and-the-open-access-movement/ ) but you can find Richard’s essay at:
https://richardpoynder.co.uk/Jaws.pdf
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
