A Quartet of Open Access Arguments

On the day that Harvard’s faculty votes on a strong open access proposal (I’m still looking for the actual text of the proposal; please add a link in the comments if you are aware of it), here are a few of the better arguments this week about the open access movement:

• danah boyd (perhaps unsurprisingly, but still bravely) decides to go 100% open access with all of her future publications, and encourages other academics to do the same.
• Robert Darnton argues in favor of the proposal in the Harvard Crimson, and highlights the importance of this being “opt-out” rather than “opt-in.” (Which, as companies from Visa to Facebook well know, means the policy will lead to much higher rates of acceptance than the opt-in provisions that are common with institutional repositories at universities right now.)
• Stan Katz worries about the financial impact of open access on humanities and social science professional societies and non-profit publishers, which are not printing money like the science publishers are.
• Don Waters wishes to complicate the partisan debate over open access by examining the greater context of scholarly communications, the differences between publishing in various fields, concerns over sustainability, and trends in education.