Introduction For a long time, research has been treated like a private club. If you wanted to read it, you had to pay expensive journal fees, almost like trying to get past a castle gate guarded by paywalls. Yet, a powerful, collective movement is now surging across continents, driven by researchers, funders, institutions, and citizens: … Read more
Introduction The academic publishing world has long been dominated by a subscription-based model, often humorously referred to as a system where public research (funded by public money) is locked behind an expensive paywall and then sold back to the very public institutions that generated it. It is a brilliant, if somewhat ethically questionable, business model. … Read more
Introduction For decades, the dominant academic publishing ecosystem has been one where research, often funded by public money, is locked behind expensive subscription paywalls. This has fueled a crisis of access, disproportionately affecting institutions and scholars in the Global South and the public at large. Enter open access, a movement aiming to liberate research from … Read more
Introduction Plan S was launched in 2018 by a coalition of research funding organizations known as cOAlition S. The original mandate was to accelerate the transition to full and immediate open access for scholarly publications. It’s a bold, disruptive, and arguably long-overdue attempt to change how publicly funded research is disseminated fundamentally. For years, the … Read more
Introduction The question of whether open access, the movement advocating for free and immediate access to scholarly research, will eventually “die” can be one a provocative debate in academic publishing. It’s a bit like asking if the internet will die: the underlying technology and fundamental human desire for knowledge sharing aren’t going anywhere, but the … Read more