To mark Open Access Week 2014, here are some links to relevant content:

In this blog

1. An overview of open access publishing;
2. A list of myths about Open Access, according to Peter Suber, the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication;

Elsewhere on the web:

1. A video explaining the Open Access publishing model, by PhD Comics;
2. A discussion of how Open Access enhances academic freedom, by Curt Rice, the head of the Board for Current Research Information System in Norway;
3. Some refreshingly candid remarks on the cost of knowledge, by Leszek Borysiewicz, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge;
4. Remarks on how Open Access can enhance public engagement with science, by Richard Price, the founder of academia.edu;
5. A report on the economics of Open Access publishing, by Ernesto Priego, Lecturer in Library Science at City University London;
6. A report on how the Directory of Open Access Journals attempted to purge questionable journals from its index.

Some concluding thoughts

In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to share some questions which I still have about open access and academic publishing in general:

• To what extent can the cost of access to knowledge be justified in terms of the services that academic publisher’s provide?
• To what extent can the Article Processing Charges (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4) be justified in terms of the services that Open Access / hybrid publishers provide?
• Is enough being done to protect Open Access from its reputational association with predatory publishering?
• What can be done to ensure that authors from low-resource research contexts are not disadvantaged by the requirement to procure funds in order to get published?
• What can be done to safeguard against the conflict of interest that may arise when a publisher, who stands to gain directly by publishing an article is also entrusted with the peer-review process?

Featured Image: “Open Access promomateriaal”, by biblioteekje @ Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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