Björn Brembs"Nearly 25 years on from the original attempt to codify [#openaccess] it hasn’t achieved what it set out to do."
https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/why-we-wont-be-funding-open-access-publishing-any-more/
Ron Beavis ❌@brembs By effectively moving their business model from charging subscribers to a mix of charging both authors & subscribers, the publishers rather elegantly won the "open access" challenge to their authority.
Yes, exactly!
Not that one couldn't have seen this coming already 15 years ago, e.g.:
http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n879.html
and it only got more obvious since:
https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/04/how-gold-open-access-may-make-things-worse/
Time we started acting on what we knew would come so many years ago...
Bill Hooker@brembs @RonBeavis I suggest they give their £5.2M publishing budget to Sci-Hub and call it good. If every scholarly and research society, association, business etc etc would just do the same, we'd be rid of Big Publishing in a month (though the lawsuits would take a few years to die off).
Jakob Voß@brembs @RonBeavis when I studied library and information science 25 years ago, the solution seemed to be document repositories and optional overlay journals, and I still think so. Just do it like Open Source software and publish BEFORE any review or submission. Anything else is lipstick on a pig.