POST: On Allington on Open Access 1

David Golumbia draws attention to Daniel Allington’s post, “On open access, and why it’s not the answer.” Allington raises critical issues about the open access movement and whether it meets its objectives, writing:

[W]hat did its advocates (me, for example) think it was going to facilitate? And now that it’s become mainstream, does it look as if it’s going to facilitate that thing we had in mind, or something else entirely?…The more I look back, the more I realise that open access had been proposed as the solution to a range of problems some of which had very little to do with one another. The more I look forward, the more I realise that among those problems were some that might actually be exacerbated by the form of open access that has become official policy in the UK-and others that were never likely to be addressed by any form of open access (including the one in which I believed).

Golumbia closes his post with the comment he added to Allington’s blog outlining some points about the limits of the open access movement including publicity, discipline specificity, and role of libraries.